Today millions of Chileans use the ClaveÚnica without wondering who promoted it. But there was a time when Andrés Arellano defended her within the government, when almost no one knew her and many thought she was unnecessary.
“There were people who laughed at my obsession. They thought it was a minor idea, and I was convinced that it was going to change the way people related to the State,” he recalls.
He insisted, and over the years the ClaveÚnica became the digital gateway to the State. Today he considers it, in a way, the most successful venture he has ever had.
Married and father of three daughters, Andrés lives his hobbies intensely and seasonally: climbing, carpentry, mountaineering. With projects it is different: you have been building things your whole life. What runs through his career is a demand that he repeats to his team today: assume that he is always thinking of himself as a child, and multiply his ambition by ten.
From laws to engineering
He entered law out of a vocation for public service. After two years he concluded that the career gave him valuable tools, but that his thing was to build, and he switched to Engineering.
- What made you leave Law for Engineering?
“I realized that my thing was to build things, and engineering allowed me to do it in a much more direct way. I maintain my vocation for public service to this day. In the end it was a very good mix: I feel completely like an engineer, but those two years gave me a humanistic foundation that defines me and that today helps me understand how our clients think.”
That mix explains a good part of what came after. He worked in a university technology study center and in an entrepreneurship promotion program, and founded his first startup, a personal finance software, in the first generation of Start-Up Chile.
The product didn’t take off, but the team did: he turned it into a software factory that later became Platanus Ventures.
Burn the ships
In 2014 he sold his participation and came to the government to lead Digital Government. For four years he led a team of 30 engineers and worked daily at La Moneda, surrounded by lawyers.
He describes it as his deepest experience in legaltech, even if it wasn’t at a startup.
Then came four years in charge of product and technology in a software company for legal studies, and other shorter projects, until he started up again.
In 2023 he co-founded a company to make software development teams more efficient, just when AI was beginning to rewrite that market.
- What has been the most difficult moment you have experienced?
“The transitions: closing what you are doing and starting a new cycle. Leaving Platanus to go to the government…
…and four years after leaving the government, they were very difficult decisions. In both one burns the ships: there is no turning back. “They are decisions that mark the rest of your life.”
From those stages he was left with a way to lead. Andrés is less interested in controlling than in providing context: explaining where the company is going, what restrictions it has and how the competition is moving, and trusting that each person moves forward autonomously.
He also rejects the idea that an entrepreneur should work 70 hours a week.
He prefers very concentrated blocks of work, and says that the challenge is not allocating time, but attention: when he is with his family, being really there and not with his head in the office.
Think ten times bigger
Magnar was born in mid-2025, when Andrés and Nicolás López, whom I had met for work a couple of years before, saw the opportunity to cross two worlds that they knew well: artificial intelligence and law.
The right, he explains, rests on text, which is precisely where AI is most powerful. And unlike software, which works the same everywhere, laws change from country to country. There is space for a regional leader.
Today the platform operates in seven countries, with nearly 30 thousand users and about 350 law firms.
Andrés attributes this growth to a clear fit with the needs of the market, to a technological asset that is difficult to replicate and to a decision they made from day one: to get certified in information security when most startups do so years later.
“Our clients sell trust. So do we,” he says.
Lift to arrive first
In September, just over a year after its founding, Magnar announced a Series A of US$8 million, led by 6 Degrees Capital and co-led by Hi Ventures, with participation from FEN Ventures, Nascent Ventures and Platanus Ventures, the same fund that was born from that software factory.
Two law firms also entered as investors: Carey, the largest in Chile, and the prestigious Argentine firm Beccar Varela. The idea is to add leading studios from the other countries where it operates in the coming months.
Even so, raising capital was not in his plans.
- Why were they reluctant to raise capital?
“Because one loses freedom, and capital is not synonymous with success. With a lot of money it is easy to make bad decisions; the restrictions force you to be rational. But we were clear about the fit with the market and we saw a window of opportunity in which speed is everything. We had to arrive before the rest and quickly become the leader of the region. We raised for speed.”
The resources will go to install own equipment and offices in Mexico and Brazil, two federal countries where a good part of the investment will be allocated to building legal databases at the state level, and deepening the presence in the markets where it already operates.
Behind both bets there is more development: a larger engineering team and a deeper adaptation to each legal system.
With the round closed, the message to the team was twofold: maintain the discipline of when there was no capital and, at the same time, force themselves to think big.
Next year he hopes to consolidate the operation in the region and let any lawyer in Latin America know that, to work, they need Magnar.
- What advice would you give to Andrés who was just starting out?
“That I would think bigger. In Chile it is easy to think small, and there is no reason to do so. If you aim far and don’t arrive, you will still go further than if you had aimed close. And that I would decide faster: when I have an intuition, I have to act sooner.”
