Beglaubigt.de turned Germany's notary bottleneck into an API

An American founder can incorporate a Delaware C-corp in a day without leaving the couch. A German founder who wants a GmbH, the standard limited-liability company, is looking at six to eight weeks.

The delay is not one big obstacle but a chain of small ones, each with its own office and its own queue. German law requires a notary to certify the incorporation, so you wait for an appointment. The notary files with the commercial register, so you wait for the entry. Then come the transparency register filing, the trade registration, the tax number application at the Finanzamt, and the business address, each a separate process with separate paperwork. Until the chain completes, the company cannot properly bank, invoice, or hire. For two months, a funded, ready-to-go business sits in administrative limbo.

Beglaubigt.de compresses that chain into as little as three days. The Munich company, operated by legaltech startup Openlaw and part of Y Combinator's Fall 2024 batch, has become Germany's leading platform for digital company formations and notarizations. It has served more than 25,000 customers, powers the formation flows of partners like Qonto, Holvi, and Sevdesk through what it calls Germany's first fully automated incorporation API, and in April 2026 closed a $3.3 million seed round to take the model across Europe.

Founders who hit the wall themselves

The two people behind Beglaubigt.de came to the problem from opposite directions, which turns out to be the right combination.

Alexander Sporenberg, the CEO, was on the founding team at Razor Group, the Berlin e-commerce aggregator that scaled past a €1.7 billion valuation and more than 150 acquisitions. Buying a company in Germany means notarizing the share transfer, and across hundreds of M&A deals Sporenberg watched notary appointments and register processes become the real bottleneck. By his account, waiting on notaries nearly derailed the business at points. The same transactions in the US would have closed in days.

Felix Gerlach, the CTO, previously founded Passbase, a digital identity verification company, and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Finance list in 2020. Verifying who someone is, securely and remotely, is the technical core of any notarial process, so the identity background maps almost exactly onto the new problem.

What makes the founding story unusual is how long the two have been circling this. They built their first prototype in 2019 and discovered that German law did not yet permit what they wanted to do. Rather than quit, they moved to where the law was moving: Austria loosened its framework in 2020, Beglaubigt.de launched there in 2022, and Germany followed in 2023 once digital formation became legally possible. That is six years of waiting for, and working within, a regulatory system most software founders would have written off. The patience reads less like stubbornness and more like a thesis: the rules were always going to catch up with the technology, and whoever had built the rails by then would win.

What the platform actually does

Beglaubigt.de's product is the entire formation chain handled in one place, rather than a prettier interface on one link of it.

A founder starting a GmbH, UG, or GbR, or a tax-optimized holding structure, goes through a digital flow that prepares the incorporation documents, coordinates the notary appointment, handles the commercial register entry and the transparency register filing, registers the business address, applies for the tax number, and can carry straight into bookkeeping once the company exists. The platform coordinates with roughly 300 notary offices to make the scheduling work, which is how a process that used to be measured in weeks gets down to about three days.

That notary network is worth pausing on, because it reveals the strategy. Beglaubigt.de did not set out to replace notaries, which in Germany would be both illegal and politically hopeless. Notarization is a constitutionally embedded part of German corporate law, and notaries are a regulated profession with a strong lobby. Instead the company built the scheduling, document preparation, and filing infrastructure around the notary, so the mandatory human step stops being the bottleneck. The notary still certifies. Everything before and after the certification runs as software.

This is a familiar pattern from other regulated markets. The companies that win rarely fight the regulation; they absorb the compliance burden so thoroughly that they become the default way of satisfying it. It also builds a moat that a pure-software competitor cannot shortcut. Anyone can build a form that generates articles of association. Integrating 300 notary offices, and the trust that comes with them, takes years.

The API is the real product

The consumer-facing site is the visible half of Beglaubigt.de. The more interesting half is the one developers see.

The company exposes the full formation flow through three dedicated APIs: one for certifications, one for incorporations, and one for tax number registrations. Partners can embed any of it directly in their own products. Qonto, the French business neobank, uses this to let founders start a German company formation from inside their Qonto account and never leave the platform. Holvi and Sevdesk, a Finnish business bank and a German accounting software company, run similar integrations.

The distribution logic is elegant. A neobank meets founders at exactly the moment of incorporation, because a new company's first real errand is opening a bank account. By embedding formation into that flow, Beglaubigt.de turns potential competitors for the founder relationship into channels. The partners get a stickier onboarding and a customer whose company they helped create. Beglaubigt.de gets distribution it never has to pay for directly, through brands founders already trust.

It also quietly changes what kind of company this is. A consumer notary website is a useful service with a marketing problem: nobody incorporates often, so you have to win each customer anew. An incorporation API embedded in the onboarding of banks and accounting platforms is infrastructure, with usage that compounds as the partners grow. Stripe made a similar journey in payments, and Stripe Atlas remains the obvious reference point for one-stop company formation. The difference is that Atlas works because Delaware was already easy. Beglaubigt.de had to make Germany easy first.

A seed round aimed at Europe

The April 2026 round brought in $3.3 million, about €2.8 million, from a group that knows the territory: Moonfire Ventures, Zeno Ventures, Combination VC, Orange Collective, and Y Ventures, the fund of YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, alongside angels from the Y Combinator network. For a 15-person Munich team, it is a focused amount of money with a clear mandate.

Part of the funding deepens the German product, adding more register processes and ongoing bookkeeping so the platform grows from formation into the running of the company. The rest goes to European expansion, and that is where the ambition shows. Germany is not unique in its bureaucracy, only above average. Civil-law notary requirements of the same general shape exist in Austria, where the company already operates, and across much of the continent. Each country means new law, new registers, and new notary relationships, which is slow work. It is also exactly the kind of work that, once done, nobody else wants to repeat.

Sporenberg frames the mission in terms bigger than paperwork: the point, he has said, is that European founders should not fail because of bureaucracy. It sounds like a slogan until you remember the founder math. Momentum is the scarcest resource a new company has, and Europe's formation timelines spend it on waiting rooms. Every week between the decision to start and the ability to operate is a week of burn and of deals that cannot be signed. Nobody can count the companies that died in that gap, which is rather the point.

The boring-infrastructure playbook

There is a category of startup that wins by being willing to do tedious, jurisdiction-specific work that neither incumbents nor typical software founders want to touch. The incumbents, in this case notaries and law firms, have no incentive to compress a process they bill by the hour and the appointment. Software founders mostly bounce off the regulation. The opening sits exactly in between, for a team technical enough to build real infrastructure and patient enough to spend six years aligning it with the law.

Beglaubigt.de fits that playbook unusually well, and its traction suggests the window is open. Twenty-five thousand customers within roughly a year of the German launch, with fintech partners embedding the API and a seed round from investors who have seen the embedded-infrastructure story before. The company that owns formation also gets first claim on everything a new business needs afterward, from registered addresses to bookkeeping to every notarized change in the company's life. Incorporation starts a relationship with the commercial register that lasts as long as the company does, and Beglaubigt.de intends to be the interface to it.

The bet, ultimately, is that Europe's legal plumbing is going digital on a schedule set by law, country by country, and that someone will own the rails when it does. Beglaubigt.de has spent since 2019 positioning for it, has the German market as proof, and now has the capital to repeat the exercise abroad. Three days instead of eight weeks is the headline. The API underneath it is the business.