A law firm and full back-office for venture-backed startups · built with Answer.AI
Virgil is named for the poet who walked Dante through hell and out the other side. That is the service: corporate legal, bookkeeping, tax, compliance and people ops, run as one team on software we build ourselves, while you build the company.
Canto I · Inferno · where you are now
A law firm on the clock. A bookkeeper who has never seen your cap table. A tax preparer you meet in March. An HR platform billing per seat. Each one is fine. Together they are how startups walk into the same nine holes, every year.
Nine circles of back-office hell · we have pulled founders out of every one
Your stage
Headcount 12
Raising in the next 12 months
Usual stack modelled from published 2025 to 2026 market rates for venture backed companies: formation $2.5k to $5k, priced round counsel $20k to $50k, bookkeeping from $600 per month, startup CPA and filings $4k to $8k per year, people ops per seat. Your quote will differ. The Virgil figure is an illustrative placeholder.
Canto II · The guide · what we do about it
That sentence is the whole product. The bookkeeper who can see the side letter prices your preferred stock correctly. The lawyer who can see payroll catches the misclassified contractor before the state does.
Formation to exit, by real attorneys.
Books an investor can diligence without flinching.
Filed on time, and credits you forgot to claim.
The quiet work that only hurts when skipped.
Hire fast without creating a problem for later.
Somebody who has read all five files in the same week, and who tells you the thing you did not ask about. That is what you are actually buying.
Our lead just sent a SAFE with a side letter. They want pro rata plus information rights. Can I sign it tonight?
Not as written. The pro rata right has no cap and no termination on a qualified financing, so it follows them into your Series A and your next lead will make you clean it up. Redline attached, plus two lines you can paste back to them.
Separately, while we were in your cap table:
Circle two. We have the consent drafted. It needs your signature, not your evening.
Built with Answer.AI
Virgil is a joint venture with Answer.AI, the lab run by Jeremy Howard, who co-founded fast.ai. We are not a law firm that bought a chatbot. Machines do the reading, the extracting and the first draft. A named attorney reviews and signs everything that reaches you.
Charter, cap table, bank, payroll, prior filings, the folder of signed PDFs nobody has opened. We read all of it and give you a list of what is wrong.
Most companies are standing in three of the nine circles. Nobody is standing in none. We pull you out before it costs anything.
One thread. No matter opening, no scoping call, no partner triage. Median first reply is 41 minutes inside working hours.
The deadline before it lands, the clause that costs you at the next round, the hire that creates a registration in a new state. Before you ask.
Canto III · Paradiso · the other side
"Relying on Virgil for our back-office has delivered an immediate and powerful return on investment. Their unified support across accounting, legal, compliance, and people ops has saved us over $30k in the first two months alone and given our team the expert guidance needed to scale with confidence."
"Virgil has been essential to rediem's growth. Luke and the team are fast, sharp, and deeply pragmatic, like having an in-house legal brain on call. They've helped us close major deals, scale our team, and stay focused on building, not getting buried in legal work. They're redefining what startup legal services should look like, and we wouldn't work with anyone else."
"Virgil has become an integral part of my operations, allowing me to offload all the back-office components and focus solely on building the business. I genuinely believe Virgil is the only critical backend support an early startup needs to hit the ground sprinting."
"The Virgil team truly feels like an extension of our own team. They handle our ops, finance, HR, and legal matters with excellence, and are always just a message away when we need them. Love working with the team!"
"It is crazy how much additional bandwidth I have with Virgil. They help me focus on the important things I need to do as a founder and not the never-ending todo list of 'running a company.' I can instantly shoot them a message and it will be resolved. I trust them with everything and recommend them to all my friends who are starting companies."
"Partnering with Virgil has been one of the smoothest decisions we've made at Qtalo. They're responsive, deeply informed, and make the complex parts of financial operations feel refreshingly simple."
Incorporated, funded on SAFEs, first few hires.
Seed or Series A closed, hiring across states.
Series B and up, international, or unusual.
These figures are placeholders in this concept, not Virgil's published prices. Virgil does not currently list pricing publicly. Swap in the real numbers before this page goes anywhere near a browser.
In the Divine Comedy, Virgil walks Dante down through hell and purgatory, and back out the other side. He goes first, because he has made the trip before.
We took the name on purpose. Nobody starts a company expecting the paperwork to be the hard part, and then it is. We know all nine circles from the inside, we know the way through, and we walk in front.
A law firm. Licensed attorneys do the legal work and sign off on it, and the attorney client relationship is with the firm. The software is ours, built with Answer.AI, and it is what lets a small team cover this much ground. It does not practise law.
Legal advice from our attorneys is privileged in the ordinary way. Bookkeeping and tax work is generally not, and we will tell you which side of the line a conversation sits on when it matters. Anyone who promises you blanket privilege across all five functions is selling.
You do. Thirty days notice, and you leave with a clean, organised, diligence ready set of records. No exit fee and no hostage taking. If a provider makes leaving painful, that tells you what they think of the work.
Client documents are not used to train general purpose models. Say the specifics out loud on the call, in writing, before you sign anything, with us or with anyone else.
Often you should not, and we will say so. The case for moving is not that your lawyers are bad. It is that nobody in your current setup reads the cap table, the books and the payroll in the same week, so the problems that live between them go unnoticed until a diligence process finds them.
Twenty minutes. You tell us the stage, the headcount and what is currently on fire. We tell you what it costs and whether we are the right answer. There is no proposal deck.
Start the climb out
Twenty minutes, a named attorney, and an honest read on your formation documents, cap table and filings. If the answer is that you are fine, we will say that.