It all started in 2013, Hando Rand was studying technology law in TalTech University. The approach to teaching law was innovative and different. Most of the courses were taught by lecturers who were also active law practitioners. The program entailed international and European law courses, including several international contracting and intellectual property law curriculum. The syllabus was put together by Addi Rull, who would later become one of Agrello founders. Addi was well aware of the challenges and opportunities that law faces with the evolution of technology.

“I have been a tech junkie and somewhat a tech nerd ever since. I went to law school because I had the feeling that the way legal procedures work currently, heavily hinder the speed of improvements in tech and their entry to market,” says Hando, the initiator of the preliminary smart contracts idea.

After law school and some legal practice experience, Hando disagreed with a world drowning in paper, while using smartphones… This paradox is even more confusing as Estonia, Agrello’s country of origin, has made massive steps in abolishing paperwork, while others struggle.

At this critical point, Hando started to engage in programming logic thought into law. Whereas law sets obligations and grants rights to people and legal entities, thus with advancing technology and in a more automated world, an obligation should be performed by and also set to a machine. Going further with these general logics in law, Hando started to put together his theory of smart obligations and rights, which is explained in Agrello’s whitepaper called “Self-Aware Contracts”.

The overall idea of Self-Aware contracts was to bring together lawyers, who “build” legal notions of obligations and rights, with technology engineers, who would integrate every possible internet connected devices, to these “smart” rights and obligations. However, Hando always had the feeling that linking actual identities to these rights and obligations would need another way of looking towards digital identity, which at the time was unavailable.

Such a system would have to tackle one critical problem that important legal paperwork creates - other parts of business become so efficient with technology that most of the effort in technological innovation goes to paperwork instead. In the end, it will halt the overall speed of technological advance - but this can’t be accepted when the world is in need of global sustainable solutions, which are technologically time consuming to create. And this is what ignited the spark that drove Hando’s next steps.

First, it was necessary to find like-minded innovative people that could share the vision. With the same line of thoughts, Margus Poola, Addi Rull and Teddi Rull started the engaging discussions on a possible business idea. They were all involved as lecturers in the university and understood the challenges they were about to face with the law if it did not harness the advances of technology. The team’s involvement started at the beginning of 2015 after several discussions on intelligent contracting topic. Teddi was the first one to come along after having an epiphany about how his children would operate with such contracting mechanisms in the future. After Teddi,; Addi and Margus followed. As the team was finally taking shape, it became obvious that they all brought the right experience in law and international contracting field. Shortly after, a major contributor takes interest, Anton Vedeshin, who joined as the Technical expert that would see execution of the idea. Anton was working on a PhD on AI and had previous experience in secure cloud computing. It felt like the right mixed of backgrounds and experiences were coming together to create something very interesting…

Not long after, in 2017 Agrello was founded.