Founders' Associate
Work directly with the founders on whatever moves the needle most: sales, GTM, finance and sharper internal processes.
About Duely
Duely is the first AI-native legal service provider for M&A in the Benelux. Powered by technology we build ourselves, we deliver the M&A legal work for PE funds, family offices and corporate M&A teams, and deploy our technology through our API across VDR platforms and enterprise environments.
Clients instruct us as they would instruct a law firm and receive the finished work: data room preparation, gap analyses and full legal due diligence reports. Our AI engine does the heavy lifting, our legal experts direct and sign off on every deliverable, and we carry full responsibility for the output. We price per deliverable, not per billable hour.
Founded in Ghent by Michiel Van Lerbeirghe (former lawyer and GC) and Michiel De Koninck (AI engineer and legal-tech lead), we have raised €1.1 million in venture capital, and our technology is integrated directly into Sterling's global VDR platform. We are still small enough to fit in one room, so you will directly shape how the company is built.
Our values
- Excellence in execution. An eye for detail in deliverables, both external and internal. Crossing your t's and dotting your i's.
- Everybody sales. Everyone has the growth of the business in mind.
- Take ownership. Our culture allows everyone to speak their mind: do so, and take ownership where you know you can make a difference.
- Be brutally honest: no ego. To grow, as a team and individually, we need to give each other constant and useful feedback, respectfully.
About the role
As Founders' Associate you work directly with the two founders on whatever moves the needle most that week. Duely is a small team doing work normally done by teams of associates, so the surface area is enormous: sales and go-to-market one day, finance and investor material the next, then turning a manual internal process into something that runs itself.
This is the classic generalist seat at an early-stage company: maximum exposure, minimum ceremony. You see every part of the business early enough to shape it, and there is no better apprenticeship for building something of your own one day.
In a startup like ours there is so much going on at once that you have to set priorities ruthlessly and stick to them, or you drown. That also means this job is sometimes about de-risking something that has been lingering for way too long (oh right, did we order X yet? didn't we say we would look into Z?). You are the legend who keeps the right things on track at the right moment: our beautiful Duely office, our reporting, our outbound, our events. You just care that it gets done, and gets done well.
Michiel De Koninck
Co-Founder | Product Lead
Responsibilities
- Push sales and GTM. Build target lists, prepare and follow up meetings, and sharpen the positioning and materials we sell with.
- Keep the numbers honest. Finance operations: invoicing, reporting, unit economics and the material our investors and board see.
- Engineerify our processes. Take recurring manual work and turn it into a tool, a workflow or an automation. If we do it twice by hand, that is on you.
- Track the market. Monitor M&A activity in our target markets so we knock on the right doors at the right moment.
- Fill the gaps. Spot what the company needs before anyone assigns it. Founder mode is the job description.
Requirements
- You are structured and fast. Several parallel workstreams without dropping quality or losing the thread.
- You write and present well. Client emails, decks and one-pagers that do not need a second pass.
- You are commercially sharp. A feel for what makes a company grow, and energy for talking to prospects and clients.
- You repeat, then you automate. As soon as you notice that a repeated process consumes time, you work your magic and build the shortcut.
- You want the founder's view. You treat this as an apprenticeship in company building, on-site in Ghent with the whole team.
- Bonus: a background in M&A, finance or consulting, or time at an early-stage startup.
Why Duely
- Meaningful equity, early. You are joining early enough that your slice matters more than rounding to zero.
- The founder apprenticeship. Daily proximity to two founders across sales, product, finance and strategy. Nowhere do you learn company building faster.
- A profession being rebuilt. M&A legal work is being reinvented right now. Help decide what it looks like in an AI-native world.
- Free lunch. Oh, you thought there was no such thing? There is at Duely. All meals at our office are paid for because we love to fuel your engine. MVL's tuna salad is quite legendary, Simon's yoghurt is quite dairy.
The team posing in their plant-filled (bit problematic) kitchen. LTR: Lucas, Simon, MVL, Arne, MDK
Ready to build with us?
Head over to the application tab and tell us about yourself. We read every application. What matters most is that you see the future of this work the way we do: not building tools for lawyers, but doing the work itself, with engineers and lawyers in the same room.
Prefer something less formal? Mail us directly at careers@duely.ai.