Winning an AI olympiad proves you can build. Turning that project into a company is a different test, and the early failures are rarely technical. They are legal, and most are avoidable.
First, capacity. Across most of Europe, a 17-year-old generally cannot sign binding contracts or take on a director’s liability alone. In Romania, for example, a minor aged 14 to 18 acts with parental consent. Parents can hold or manage shares on the founder’s behalf, but that should be written down, rather than hopefully assumed. If the founder turns 18 in a few months, waiting may be a simpler fix than building around the gap.
Second, and most important: who owns what? At EUROAI, for instance, the rules might not say anything about intellectual property. Contestants keep their code by default, but the competition tasks and datasets belong to the organisers, and a model trained on them is not automatically yours to commercialise. The bigger risk might also sit elsewhere: school or university policies, lab work, a mentor’s input and teammates’ commits. Investors ask for a clean chain of title when it comes to IP, so every contributor should assign their rights to the company in writing.
Third, what the product is built on. Open-source licences, model licences with commercial restrictions, and training data used without checking rights are the three issues that most often affect a clean IP title.
Fourth, the team. Young co-founders might drift apart. A short founders’ agreement with vesting and a clear equity split costs little now and saves the company later for the founder who remains invested, once priorities had changed.
Finally, regulation. If the product touches personal data, GDPR applies too, and especially if it is used in education, hiring or health, check whether the EU AI Act treats it as high risk and whether you can demonstrate that the training datasets do not infringe privacy or copyrighted works.
None of this needs a big budget initially, it rather needs a bit of discipline to look after the unglamorous part of a successful start-up.
Andrei Pavel is a technology lawyer advising startups on IP, SaaS contracts, and compliance, helping them start, build, and scale across the EU. He has hands-on experience building digital tools and works with early-stage companies on product launches, funding, and regulatory strategy. Andrei also mentors founders in accelerator programs and deals with legal innovation projects at Ventures’n’Law.
