What Happens When Legal Minds Meet Machine Intelligence?
Ex Nunc Intelligence is a Swiss-based legal technology company – the 1st LegalTech from EPFL – that empowers legal professionals with advanced AI tools to navigate complexity and redefine how they access, manage and leverage legal knowledge.
The founding team — Zoé, Kyriaki, and Thomas — brings a unique blend of legal and tech expertise. Before starting the venture, Zoé (tax specialist) and Kyriaki (lawyer) were working together and experienced firsthand the recurring inefficiencies in legal research and knowledge management. Thomas, with his deep expertise in AI and data science, joined to help turn that insight into a scalable, intelligent platform. The idea for Ex Nunc was born out of real-world frustrations and a shared ambition to transform legal knowledge into a strategic asset.
Our mission is to redefine the way legal professionals access, manage, and leverage legal knowledge. By combining cutting-edge AI with a structured legal database, we provide a strategic assistant that helps users reduce time spent on complex legal tasks from hours to minutes. Our long-term impact lies in our ability to turn fragmented legal data into a reliable and scalable decision-support infrastructure.
Silex, our platform, acts as a legal co-pilot. It digests vast volumes of legal texts, jurisprudence and other legal documents to provide clear, context-aware answers and drafting assistance. This helps legal departments and law firms reduce uncertainty by basing their planning on complete, up-to-date, and verifiable legal information, significantly mitigating risks linked to gaps or inconsistencies in knowledge.
Our primary users are legal professionals: law firms, corporate legal departments, insurances with legal protections, financial and public institutions.
Each of them shares a core need: conducting legal research efficiently. That's where Silex comes in — by offering direct, structured, and intelligent access to the legal information they need. But beyond research, Silex also supports drafting, providing users with substantive-level control, not just formal structuring. This is made possible thanks to our proprietary legal database and the way our AI models are trained to master legal knowledge, reasoning, and methodology. We co-develop features through our Legal Lab to ensure that Silex integrates seamlessly into their specific workflows, terminology, and jurisdictional requirements.
Our platform continuously processes and indexes legal updates, regulatory changes, and new case law. Through our proprietary pipeline, these signals are translated into alerts, summaries, and suggested actions. By structuring the data and applying intelligent filters, we help users identify what truly matters early on and what concrete actions to take.
We do not position ourselves as a risk analytics or scenario planning company. What sets us apart is our focus on equipping legal professionals with structured, pre-processed, and context-aware legal information, enabling them to make faster, more informed decisions. We may suggest relevant directions or highlight critical insights, but the strategic choices always remain in the hands of the professional. Rather than replacing legal judgment, Silex enhances it — by surfacing the right information at the right time, grounded in solid legal reasoning and methodology.
One of the most striking reactions we often witness during product demos is when we let legal professionals try Silex themselves. They enter a legal question — sometimes quite complex — and within seconds, they get a clear, structured, and sourced answer. At that moment, you can see the surprise on their faces, and they react spontaneously with genuine amazement — often explaining that this exact research took them hours, sometimes even days, to complete !
It's a powerful moment that speaks for itself. It's not just about saving time — it's about experiencing a true paradigm shift in how legal knowledge is accessed and used. We've seen this reaction consistently across law firms, corporate legal teams, and public institutions, confirming that Silex fundamentally transforms the legal research workflow.
One of the biggest challenges we faced was harmonizing the chaos of legal data — ensuring consistent quality despite the vast disparity in formats, sources, and structures. Bringing together the various sources of law into a unified, reliable database required both hard work and smart engineering.
Another major challenge was making a search engine work at scale: retrieving the right information quickly and accurately across millions of data points. This involved building robust indexing pipelines, developing custom preprocessing tools, and continuously optimizing relevance and performance.
Ultimately, we overcame these hurdles through a combination of deep legal expertise, strong collaboration with our users, and a relentless focus on precision, speed, and scalability.
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Our next steps include expanding across Switzerland — from French-speaking regions to German- and Italian-speaking ones. We also plan to enter in neighbourouding countries and in the EU as the second step. In terms of product we have a super exciting roadmap but we are very discrete about what we're bulinding until it's out there.
Partnerships are an important pillar of our growth strategy. We collaborate not only with public institutions, but also with private organizations. Several exciting partnerships are currently being finalized, and we look forward to sharing more details soon. We are always open to new collaborations that align with our vision.
What three pieces of advice would you give to other founders building tech-driven solutions in highly complex domains?
Co-create with your users from day one — complexity requires alignment with real practices.
Invest early in data architecture — your models are only as good as your underlying data.
Don't wait for perfection — deploy fast, learn continuously, and iterate openly.
Picture: Ex Nunc Intelligence founder team picture Zoé Berry and Kyriaki Bongard Picture@ Marie-Lou Dumauthioz/Tamedia
Thank you Zoé Berry and Kyriaki Bongard for the Interview
Statements of the author and the interviewee do not necessarily represent the editors and the publisher opinion again.
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