Nexl

Founded in Sydney in 2018 by Philipp Thurner, Nexl is an AI-powered growth platform designed exclusively for the business side of law. It brings CRM, marketing, business development, and collaboration into a single system that connects lawyers with the marketing and BD teams who support them.

The defining idea is "zero-entry." Instead of asking lawyers to log contacts and meetings, Nexl captures relationship data automatically from email and calendar activity - mapping who knows who across the firm without anyone typing a thing. That single design choice addresses the reason most legal CRMs fail: nobody uses them.

On top of that clean relationship data, Nexl layers pipeline tracking, referral tracking, targeted marketing, opportunity management, and an AI layer that surfaces cross-sell openings, revenue insights, and at-risk client alerts. The result is meant to turn CRM from a passive filing cabinet into an active growth engine.

More than 150 firms worldwide - including AmLaw 100 leaders - now use it, spanning Australia and New Zealand, the Americas, and EMEA. The company keeps its headquarters in Sydney while running leadership hubs in New York and Chicago.

Most firms could technically bolt a generic CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot onto their practice, and several legacy legal players - InterAction, Litera, Introhive - have long served the market. What sets Nexl apart is that it was built from the ground up for how law firms actually grow, rather than adapted from a sales tool.

The automatic data capture removes the adoption tax that sinks other systems. Its collaboration features reach beyond marketing to the lawyers themselves. And its integrations - notably with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft 365 - map email relationships without manual work.

One customer summed the appeal up as "a Swiss Army knife," adding that "Nexl makes my life so easy... it's the modern solution." For firms drowning in disconnected point tools, consolidation is itself the feature.

In market terms, Nexl sits in the growing category of relationship-intelligence and business-development software for professional services - a space investors increasingly see as under-served. Tidemark Capital, which led the Series B, frames Nexl as the platform turning the business of law into a genuine, firm-wide growth engine.

Nexl's US$23M Series B, announced in October 2025, was led by growth-equity firm Tidemark Capital - founded by Dave Yuan - with existing investors Shearwater Capital and EVP participating. It followed a US$6.6M Series A in December 2023.

The company said the new capital will fund development of its AI-powered growth platform, advance an acquisition strategy, and support several new leadership appointments. Some Australian coverage cited the round in local terms (around A$35M), reflecting currency conversion of the same US$23M raise.

Philipp Thurner is Nexl's CEO and founder. Before starting the company he led innovation at Gilbert + Tobin, a major Australian law firm, where he watched partners quietly ignore the expensive CRM the firm had bought. That inside view of the adoption problem became the founding premise of Nexl: build the system lawyers would actually use.

Under his leadership Nexl has grown from a Sydney startup into a globally distributed company with leadership hubs in New York and Chicago and a customer base that reaches the top of the AmLaw rankings. Thurner's stated goal is to make business development scalable and accessible - so growth is driven by the whole firm, not just a handful of rainmakers.