For the first time, a Latin American company was the winner in a competition in the Web Summit, the largest innovation and entrepreneurship conference in Europe. The event, held annually since 2009, includes Pitch, a competition among startups that, over three days, competed live for the award for best pitch — a concise and persuasive presentation made by entrepreneurs to potential investors, business partners or customers. In the 2023 edition, which took place between November 11th and 14th in Lisbon, Portugal, 2,608 companies registered, of which 105 qualified for the pitch competition. And the big winner was Inspire, a Brazilian legaltech (startup in the legal field) founded by alumni of the Entrepreneurship in Action course at Insper.
Rafael Grimaldi, CEO and co-founder of Inspira, says that the award was a surprise. “It was quite unexpected, as there had never been a Latin American startup, much less a legaltech, that had reached the end of the competition,” he says. “But it was wonderful, a recognition that shows that we were able to build something cool.” The choice of the best pitch in Lisbon was made by a panel of judges and the public.
Founded by Grimaldi and two partners, Cauê Amaral and Henrique Ferreira, Inspira is a platform that allows research on case law in an automated way, generating reports and insights based on data from more than 32 Brazilian courts. “Our vision has always been to help lawyers work better, as well as to help the country to have lower legal costs”, says Grimaldi. “Our legal system is still cumbersome and slow, and we want to help it become more efficient.” And there is no shortage of opportunities for this: Brazil, he remembers, has the largest number of lawyers in the world in proportion to the population — and is the country that spends the most on the Judiciary in relation to GDP.
The idea of starting a business in this area arose when Grimaldi and his partners were still working at a law firm, where they met and worked together between 2014 and 2018. But it was in 2019 that the first steps were taken. Grimaldi had left the law firm and worked at Endeavor, a network of entrepreneurs that, at the time, was based in the Insper building. “I was lucky because Endeavor had several partnerships with Insper to offer courses”, he recalls.
That’s how he decided to take the Entrepreneurship in Action course, then coordinated by professor Daniel Ibri and carried out by Insper’s Entrepreneurship Center (Cemp). “When I saw the course schedule, I thought it was the ideal opportunity to ‘play at being an entrepreneur’ and explore the ideas I already had”, says Grimaldi. He invited his now two partners to also take the course, which started in October 2019 and lasted three months — which, by the way, were very intense. “In the first day of the course, Daniel [Ibri] said that we had to bring an idea for the next class and that we would leave with prototypes”, he recalls.
According to Grimaldi, more than simply attending classes, from the beginning students were encouraged to put their ideas into practice. “We owe a lot to Insper. If no one had pushed us to spend energy and incubate the idea, everything would have remained in our heads”, he states.
According to Grimaldi, the course’s “hands-on” methodology made a difference. Another significant point was the support received from teachers. “It’s important to take all the ideas and go through organized mentoring,” he says. “For us, it was essential to go through this process, with an incubator methodology, almost as if it were a certification of what we were doing.”
Encouraged by the teachers, Grimaldi and his partners began selling the first prototype during the course. “We followed the methodology step by step, until we had a product”, he says. “There was no technology yet, but we designed a prototype and Daniel suggested that we go out and sell the service.” This is how Inspira came about.
Initially, the entrepreneurs sold a case law research report to law firms and end customers. To this end, they began to program the first crawlers (trackers for data collection) and to gather judicial data in a cloud. After the research, the three of them manually generated the report to be delivered to clients. “This product soon started to have recurring demand, and we saw that it had value”, says Grimaldi. “That’s how we decided to develop software to speed up the process.” One year and a half ago, the product was officially launched.
Today, Inspira has a platform that generates reports for customers automatically. The idea, over time, is to expand services. “Since the award at the Web Summit, Brazilian, Latin American, European and North American investors started to contact us, as well as a government company”, says Grimaldi. According to him, the plan is for the product to be a complete assistant in the daily routine of a lawyer or jurist — and transform the way people work in the legal area. “Our tool is just the beginning of this journey”, he states.
Although the Entrepreneurship in Action course is no longer part of Insper’s portfolio, the school currently has the Paulo Cunha Innovation and Entrepreneurship Hub, which brings together Cemp and hub.i9 (content channel about innovation and entrepreneurship) and promotes innovation in partnership with companies and institutions. “The Hub’s mission is to connect Insper’s ecosystem of entrepreneurs with the most innovative products on the market,” says Daniel Ibri, who is currently a professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at Insper.
According to him, the objective continues to be to help students exercise their business ideas from the beginning, within companies or by founding their own enterprise. “Insper focuses a lot on the applied side. It is academic rigor combined with the practical experience of those who, in fact, have market experience.”
Ibri remembers the time when he was the teacher of Inspira’s current partners. “We brought people from the market to teach and we had the students put together part of the project and present it to a panel, which gave them feedback”, he recalls. Today, at the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Hub, integration with different areas of Insper provides an environment of collaboration. “Insper has an engineering school and a laboratory, so we are able to develop different experiences together”, says Ibri. “In addition, we try to understand the needs of each student to adapt knowledge and teaching to this reality.”