He was handed a spreadsheet of the world's lawyers and told to email each of them once a year for updates. He built a company instead.
Philipp Thurner runs a software company called Nexl, which sells a CRM to law firms, which is a sentence that undersells the specific weirdness of the market he chose. Lawyers do not, as a general rule, like software. They especially do not like software that asks them to type things. Nexl's central design decision is that it does not.
The company is headquartered in Sydney, where Thurner started it as a solo founder in 2018. It is now used by more than 150 firms including several members of the AmLaw 100 - the ranking of America's hundred largest law firms by revenue - and in October 2025 closed a $23 million Series B led by Tidemark Capital, bringing total funding to around $45 million. Reports of the round in the Australian press pegged it at A$35 million and a valuation near $100 million. Thurner is 32-ish and Austrian and lives in Brooklyn.
The origin story is small. Thurner was working at Gilbert + Tobin, one of Australia's largest law firms, on the legal solutions and innovation side. Somebody handed him a spreadsheet. On it: the contact details of lawyers in other jurisdictions - the people you route international work to. His job, or part of it, was to email them once a year to check whether anything had changed. It was 2017 or thereabouts, and there was already an entire industry of software built to handle this exact problem, none of which the firm's lawyers appeared to be using. Thurner has said in interviews that he was struck by how the workflow was almost aggressively manual.
When every lawyer is empowered to contribute to growth, and BD and marketing step into their rightful place as strategic partners rather than support functions, firms unlock their true potential.— Philipp Thurner, on the $23M Series B, October 2025
Nexl was not always a CRM. Its first identity, from around 2018 to 2020, was closer to a professional network - a "LinkedIn for lawyers" with a matching layer that let a partner in São Paulo find, say, an antitrust specialist in Frankfurt. There was a Tinder-flavored routing algorithm. It was, in the way of many good ideas, not a business.
Thurner has spoken about this candidly. The collaboration product could not get to revenue that scaled. What he had built underneath it - a graph of who knew whom, and how, and how recently - turned out to be interesting to a different buyer inside the same law firm: the marketing and business development team. Those teams had been fighting legacy CRMs like InterAction for years, mostly losing. In January 2021 he relaunched the underlying tech as a CRM.
The design bet: lawyers would never fill it in. So the software fills itself. Nexl reads inboxes and calendars, extracts relationships and updates contact records automatically. Thurner calls this "zero-entry." It is the sort of feature that sounds like plumbing and is, in practice, the entire product.
The move to New York followed the customers. As the US book of business grew, Thurner relocated to Brooklyn to be closer to the AmLaw buyers he was courting. Sydney remains headquarters. He has been open in Australian press about the pragmatism of the shift - the US is where the money for legal tech is, and being an eleven-hour flight away is a tax.
Total: ≈ $45M. Series B reported as A$35M in Australia, $23M USD in the US.
At Gilbert + Tobin, Thurner was handed a spreadsheet of overseas lawyers used to route cross-border work. He was told to email them once a year and ask them to update their own contact details. That was the process. He founded Nexl not long after.
Nexl's first product had a matchmaking element - swipe-adjacent - to help lawyers find the right foreign counsel for a specific matter. It did not generate enough revenue. Everything else did.
Thurner has said in Austrian press that growing up watching his father run an IT company in an alpine town shaped the way he thinks about the daily texture of running a software business.
If you Google him you may find a biomechanics professor at TU Wien. Different person. Same name, different Austria.
Grew up here
Founded Nexl · still HQ
Lives and sells here
This investment reinforces our role as the long-term growth partner for law firms ready to elevate how they operate and compete.— Philipp Thurner, on Tidemark's lead check
Austrian-born founder and CEO of Nexl, an AI-powered CRM and growth platform for law firms, headquartered in Sydney with a US base in New York.
He founded Nexl in Sydney in October 2018 as a solo founder. It was originally pitched as a "LinkedIn for lawyers" before pivoting to a CRM in January 2021.
Approximately $45 million total, including a $6.6M Series A in December 2023 and a $23M USD Series B (reported as A$35M) led by Tidemark Capital in October 2025.
Brooklyn, New York. Nexl remains headquartered in Sydney, with leadership hubs in New York and Chicago.
He worked in legal solutions and innovation at Gilbert + Tobin, one of Australia's largest law firms, and founded an earlier innovation consultancy called Chitit.