From the German grübeln
— to think hard, to keep digging deeper.

Every matter,
its own AI.

Problem

AI is built for the general case, not yours.

Each legal matter is its own world of facts, parties, customs, jurisdiction, and courts. General-purpose systems are trained outside of that world, and on critical work they miss what it requires.

Thesis

Automating the specialization loop.

Our vision is a future where every matter builds its own AI, one that knows its world and does the best possible work within it. Currently, specialization requires manual, repetitive labor — run, inspect, patch, run again — that doesn't scale.

Grubel is a research lab built on a simple bet: that loop can be automated. We’re bringing data curation, adaptation, and evaluation into a specialization loop that trains and improves on the matter itself.

The specialization loop
Data engine
Discovers and curates task-relevant data and feedback signals
Matter adaptation
Specializes model, agent, and harness jointly to the matter, at test time
Continual evaluation
Benchmarks improvements in a continual loop
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Payoff

Frontier performance at lower cost.
Beyond the frontier on complex matters.

The system learns what works best for each matter. This makes sovereign open-weight systems competitive with frontier models, and pushes frontier models further.

Custody

You own the data, you own the intelligence.

Matter-specific AI supports local deployments on your infrastructure, in your jurisdiction. Files never leave your custody, and nothing learned on one matter leaks into the next. Confidentiality and ethical walls stand by design, not policy.

Founding team
Moritz Hardt
Co-founder
Director, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Co-inventor of test-time training and methodology partner on Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark.
Reinhard Heckel
Co-founder
Professor, TU Munich. Co-creator of OpenThoughts and DataComp.
Vedant Nanda
Founding member of technical staff
Ex-Mistral, ex-Aleph Alpha, CS PhD from the University of Maryland and Max Planck. Core contributor to Mistral Large and co-creator of Lawma.
Navid Rekabsaz
Founding member of technical staff
Former professor and Lead AI Scientist at Thomson Reuters, with a decade of research on AI and retrieval.
Pre-seed
Point NineLead
Jeff DeanCo-Founder and CEO, Discovery Loop
Chris RéProfessor, Stanford University and Co-Founder, Together AI
Ion StoicaProfessor, UC Berkeley and Co-Founder, Databricks and Anyscale
Gabe PereyraPresident and Co-Founder, Harvey
Winston WeinbergCEO and Co-Founder, Harvey
Early access

Bring us your hardest matters.

Grubel is for teams pushing AI into complex, high-stakes legal work — whether you build AI products, practice law, or run legal inside an enterprise. Bring a matter, a workflow, or an existing system.

Let’s dig in.

Request early access
Contact

Contact us.