Magnar closes $8M Series A to scale AI-powered legal platform across LATAM
Chilean legaltech startup Magnar announced an $8 million Series A in September 2025, positioning the company to accelerate regional expansion barely a year after cofounders Andrés Arellano and Nicolás López launched the AI-powered legal research and workflow platform. The round was led by 6 Degrees Capital and co-led by Hi Ventures, with participation from FEN Ventures, Nascent Ventures, and Platanus Ventures.
Two prominent law firms took equity positions: Carey, Chile's largest legal practice, and Argentina's Beccar Varela. Magnar plans to bring on leading firms from additional markets where it operates as investors in coming months, creating a network of strategic partners across the region.
The platform now serves approximately 30,000 users across seven countries, with around 350 law firms as clients. The company operates in Chile, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Costa Rica, with expansion into Mexico and Brazil now funded.
Arellano, who previously led Chile's digital government initiative and spent four years in charge of product and technology at a legal software company, cofounded Magnar in mid-2025 alongside López. In interviews with Startups Latam, Arellano emphasized that the decision to raise capital centered on speed rather than necessity. The company had achieved product-market fit and saw a time-sensitive opportunity to establish regional leadership before competitors gained traction. Capital enables velocity, he noted, but only if teams maintain the operational discipline practiced before funding.
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Why Magnar's regional expansion signals growing demand for legal tech engineering talent
Expansion into Mexico and Brazil will require substantial engineering investment to build state-level legal databases in both federal systems, a technical challenge distinct from the national-level work required in unitary legal systems like Chile or Colombia. This infrastructure development creates immediate demand for engineers with expertise in legal data architecture, natural language processing for Spanish and Portuguese, and systems capable of handling jurisdictional complexity at scale.
The platform differentiates itself from general-purpose AI tools by embedding local legal knowledge directly into the product. Rather than requiring lawyers to teach a generic language model about their country's statutes and case law, Magnar arrives with more than 70 million laws and court decisions already indexed and searchable with verifiable citations. This approach demands continuous engineering work to ingest, structure, and maintain legal content as regulations evolve and courts issue new rulings.
For companies building engineering teams in Chile, Magnar's growth trajectory illustrates how specialized vertical AI applications create different talent requirements than horizontal SaaS products. The company earned ISO 27001 certification for information security management early in its lifecycle, recognizing that law firms sell confidentiality and require vendors to meet enterprise security standards from day one. This compliance posture, combined with AI governance work toward ISO 42001 certification, requires security engineers and compliance specialists alongside core product developers.
The legal tech market in Latin America remains fragmented, with most solutions serving single countries and few platforms achieving true regional scale. Magnar's ability to attract law firms as equity investors suggests professional services firms recognize AI tools as infrastructure rather than optional productivity aids. For talent teams focused on Argentina recruitment agency partnerships or expanding tech talent in Brazil, this shift indicates growing demand for engineers who understand both AI systems and regulated industry requirements.
Arellano's background bridges law and engineering. He spent two years studying law before switching to engineering, then directed an engineering team inside Chile's presidential palace while leading the national digital government program. That experience, including his work championing the ClaveÚnica digital identity system that millions of Chileans now use, gave him extended exposure to how lawyers think and work. The combination positions Magnar to recruit talent that bridges technical execution and domain expertise in legal workflows.
Team scaling priorities as Magnar establishes offices in Mexico and Brazil
The Series A capital will fund physical offices and dedicated teams in Mexico and Brazil, Magnar's two largest new markets. Both countries use federal legal systems, meaning laws and court precedents exist at national and state levels. Arellano indicated that a significant portion of the investment will go toward building state-level legal databases, a data engineering challenge that requires local legal expertise combined with technical infrastructure capable of maintaining accuracy across dozens of jurisdictions.
Mexico and Brazil, as federal countries, each maintain distinct legal codes at the state level for matters under local jurisdiction, multiplying the content acquisition and structuring work required to deliver the verifiable legal research the platform promises. This complexity far exceeds what Magnar has managed in the Andean and Central American markets where the platform currently operates.
Hiring priorities will likely emphasize several categories. Data engineers who can build and maintain legal content pipelines at scale become critical as indexed material grows. Machine learning engineers focused on natural language processing will need to refine models for Mexican Spanish variants and Brazilian Portuguese, ensuring the AI agent understands legal terminology and reasoning patterns specific to each jurisdiction. Product engineers will adapt workflows to accommodate how Mexican and Brazilian law firms structure their practices, which may differ from patterns in Chile or Colombia.
Arellano's leadership philosophy emphasizes context over control. He prefers to explain the company's direction, constraints, and competitive environment, then trust team members to advance with autonomy. This approach typically requires hiring senior practitioners who can operate independently, a talent profile that commands premium compensation in competitive markets.
The company faces a cultural scaling challenge common to startups moving from initial product-market fit to multi-country operations. Arellano acknowledged that the team must simultaneously maintain financial discipline while forcing themselves to think bigger. He described a tendency in Chile to think small and urged his team to multiply their ambition by ten, a mindset shift that often requires different talent as companies scale.
Platanus Ventures, which participated in the Series A, has a direct connection to Magnar's origin story. Arellano founded his first startup, a personal finance software product, in the inaugural cohort of Start-Up Chile, the government-backed accelerator program. That product failed, but the team evolved into a software development shop that later became Platanus Ventures. The fund's involvement brings both capital and a network of technical founders who have scaled engineering teams across Latin America.
Magnar's stated goal for the coming year is to become the default tool for lawyers across Latin America. Achieving that ambition will test whether the company can recruit, onboard, and retain talent quickly enough to outpace competitors while maintaining the product quality and security posture that convinced Chile's largest law firm and Argentina's Beccar Varela to become investors.