When Raphael Lim, 23, and Jamison Teng, 24, met in 2022, their time together was filled with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu training and playing video games.

But now, their hangouts look different as they work through the twists and turns of running a year-old legal technology startup.

Lim and Teng are the cofounders of Jam & Raph, a startup that provides AI consultancy services to law firms.

Juggling the demands of the startup alongside their law and computer science degrees at two of Singapore’s top colleges hasn’t been easy, often putting their studies on the back seat.

How they got into legal tech

Lim, a second-year computer science student at the National University of Singapore, and Teng, a final-year law student at the Singapore Management University, competed in a collegiate legal tech hackathon in 2024 and placed second. This gave them the idea to start a business in the legal tech space.

“I saw that there was a lot of money being invested in the big firms like Harvey and Legora, so that’s when I realized there was actually a market for this,” Teng said.

Harvey, one of the most prominent legal AI startups, has conducted several funding rounds over the past year and announced a valuation of $15.5 billion in September. Legora announced a $550 million Series D round in March, at a $5.55 billion valuation.

Lim and Teng launched the company in November — finals season for both of them — with 2,500 Singapore dollars, or about $1,950, from SMU’s entrepreneurship incubation program. They brought on 10 team members, all college students, and kickstarted Jam & Raph.

Their product: Running workshops for law firms to teach lawyers how to use AI tools effectively and token-efficiently. They also started offering consultations to the firms, helping them build AI products tailored to their needs.

Their workshops, which are two to three hours long, cost SG$2,000 to SG$3,000, and they charge SG$120 per hour for consultations.

They poured a little of their savings into the venture — less than $2,000 combined — but operating expenses are low, mainly their $150 monthly Claude subscriptions and email domain fees. They say they’ve stuck all their revenue in their company bank account for now, not paying themselves anything.

Putting out fires during finals week

Despite studying in Singapore, a country that is infamous for its rigorous and competitive academic culture, both Teng and Lim said that working on the business always takes precedence over their studies.

“My GPA took a total hit, but I think that’s just the cost of doing a startup when you are in university, so that is to be expected,” Lim said.

Teng said he’s seen his grades improve in classes that blend tech and law. His core law classes have taken a hit, but that hasn’t phased him.

“I think Singapore still places a lot of emphasis on academics, but the more we talk to people and clients outside Singapore, like Americans or Europeans, they care more about your story,” he said.

But problems always seem to arise at the most inconvenient times, they said, like clients calling them about product failures during their final weeks, when they have to study for multiple exams.

It’s also taken a toll on their social lives.

“We’ve had clients sending emails saying, ‘Hey, your product is down,’ while we’re having drinks with friends, and we have to immediately deal with it,” Lim said.

Lim said that he’s missed out on a large part of the freshman college experience.

“Everyone was out partying and joining clubs, meeting new people, and I would be cooped up in my room, coding,” he said.

He added that his ex-partner got angry at him when he didn’t answer the phone all day while he was solving a technical issue for their product, and then had to complete schoolwork.

The duo doesn’t meet to practice Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or play video games anymore, either, and their hangouts are all about work.

It’s better to fail in college

For Teng, it was an opportunity to test out entrepreneurship in a safe space before entering the workforce.

“It’s okay to fail because if you fail as a student startup founder, I think it’s pretty expected; there’s no real heat that you can get in terms of responsibilities,” he said, adding that people are a lot warmer toward student entrepreneurs.

Lim said running a business is a good window to the world outside the classroom.

“My peers will be doing a lot of academics, research theory, but I get to see how these theories actually apply in the real world,” he said.

Neither of them sees this as a replacement for a postgrad job hunt, though, with both saying that they want to get corporate work experience.

“It was more of a ‘good to have,’ something we built for the love of the game to bring something to the world,” Lim said.