Spaak: When Politics Becomes a Workflow

While the world is rapidly changing and global power dynamics are shifting, CEOs in leading companies around the world are increasingly occupied with politics, policy and regulation. 

Despite the massive impact politics has on business, it remains under-digitized, often associated with slow-moving decisions and bureaucracy. In adjacent fields like law, start-ups like Legora and Harvey are disrupting paperwork-heavy industries at a pace which 3 years ago was unthinkable.  Spaak is here to do that for Government Affairs. 

Arthur co-founded Spaak Technologies with Lucas Damsgaard, Marcus Nerløe Kassebeer, and Karl-Emil Waldstrøm Plum. The company has raised €1.5m from Node.vc and J12, grown to a 20-person team, and is used by 100+ clients including public sector institutions, enterprises like Danfoss and consultancies like Rud Pedersen.

Spaak’s product uses AI to streamline the process of monitoring regulatory changes easily, track legislation, map and log stakeholder interactions and create actionable analyses of policy amendments impacting their business. 

In 2025, Spaak launched internationally and opened a base in Brussels, the heart of European politics,  to deepen EU coverage, with early customer momentum on the ground.

We sat down with Arthur to talk about what it takes to earn trust in regulated, reputation-sensitive industries, and how Spaak scales from Danish traction to becoming a default tool for policy teams worldwide.

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Q: You went from no product and no revenue to customers “lining up” within six months. What was the exact wedge? Which one decision made the product click for Government Affairs-teams?

– Actually, just three months haha. We were laser focused on getting people to pay for our product as soon as possible so that we could get some honest feedback from someone that had money at stake. No one studying public policy got into politics to do desk work, and the real value of GA-teams is created when humans interact with humans in political negotiations and debates. For our users, AI is the opportunity to leverage their time better and exchange paperwork with network.

Q: You have moved a big part of the team into a Brussels hackerhouse to win the EU market. What is structurally harder about EU public affairs than Denmark, and what are you building that classic monitoring tools do not solve?

– Yes, Brussels and Washington are the two places to be in our industry. The EU institutions, White House and Capitol Hill are the Wall Streets of politics, so we moved. What’s harder for our users is simply the scale of impact which EU- and international regulation has compared to that of domestic policy, and the massive amount of work that follows for those whose job it is to protect their companies against overregulation (think GDPR, AI Act, data center buildouts, etc). Our tool uses AI to filter out the noise and execute actions on behalf of our users, while legacy products use keywords and boolean logic to filter updates and don’t assist in taking action.

Q: So your tool “executes actions for your users”. Where do you draw the line between automation and judgement? What parts must stay human because the cost of being wrong is reputational, not just operational?

– Politics is quite special due to the fact that so much in politics happens “behind the scenes”. People talk to people, negotiations are behind closed doors and strategies confidential. Due to this, people have much more information about circumstances, which leads to them being a much better decision maker on the strategic direction of Government Affairs-work.  Our aim is to allow our users to inform their decisions with a clear overview of publicly available data, streamline their internal knowledge and through this get more time for human interaction, which leads to better decision making. In politics, reputation is everything, hence why this is so important.

Q: Four times the revenue, still no bottom line; a proper VC tenet. You are explicit that profitability is not the goal yet. What is the growth bottleneck you are spending into? Data coverage, product depth, sales cycle, or onboarding and change management inside large organisations?

– Our market is a classic landgrab, and our goal is to win. Hiring senior sales talent from the industry and being more relentless than anyone else in building the best-in-class product and delivering an implementation that drives long-term value creation through adoption is our key priority and why we operate with a burn.

Q: Ten customers are already in Brussels. Those first ten are the canary in the coal mine. What did they buy first, what objections did they raise, and what did you have to change in the product in order to be credible in the EU apparatus?

– Spaak’s strategy is to be the AI partner for the most ambitious and skilled GA-teams, meaning that our customers expect excellence. Naturally with high expectations, they have ongoing feedback, which we’re grateful for as it pushes us to think ahead and do better every day. Our key learning was that people were not looking for another platform to use but a co-worker to delegate to, which is what our design philosophy is now based upon. Spaak should feel like an actual assistant, not another tool.

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