{"id":192138,"date":"2025-06-17T16:41:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-17T16:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/192138\/"},"modified":"2025-06-17T16:41:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-17T16:41:09","slug":"sequoia-backed-crosby-launches-a-new-kind-of-ai-powered-law-firm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/192138\/","title":{"rendered":"Sequoia-backed Crosby launches a new kind of AI-powered law firm"},"content":{"rendered":"

The tech industry talks a lot about how AI is going to transform work. Legal startup Crosby<\/a>, which just came out of stealth with a $5.8 million seed round led by Sequoia, is perhaps the most extreme example of what\u2019s coming that we\u2019ve seen to date.<\/p>\n

Crosby isn\u2019t just making AI software for lawyers \u2013 although it is doing that. Crosby is an actual law firm using AI to provide legal services at a speed never before possible.<\/p>\n

Rather than selling tech to lawyers, Crosby has hired lawyers who use its internally developed AI software. It sells contract-review legal services, largely to startups. The company is currently promising that its AI software, with human overseers, can review a new client contract in under an hour. And it hopes to get that down even faster \u2013 perhaps to just minutes, according to its co-founder CTO John Sarihan, who spoke with TechCrunch.<\/p>\n

Ryan Daniels, Crosby\u2019s co-founder and CEO, is a lawyer himself and the son of two law professors. He cut his teeth at Cooley, one of the biggest firms that represents the tech industry. He then spent the better part of a decade doing general counsel work for startups.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy last company, where I was the only legal person, grew from about 10 to 100 people, and I found that most of the time that I was spending on legal was for our contracts, sales agreements, [and] MSAs,\u201d Daniels said, referring to the part of a customer contract known as a master service agreement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Contract negotiations and legal review were such a bottleneck at the company that they were the \u201creason why we weren\u2019t growing as fast as we wanted to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, contract negotiation remains a human-to-human process, which can take weeks or months.<\/p>\n

While there are a growing number of AI tools that help lawyers speed up parts of their work, Crosby\u2019s founders believed that the only way to use AI to really change the legal industry, was by \u201cbuilding our own law firm in order to own the entire process, end to end,\u201d said Daniels.<\/p>\n

Sarihan, who was an early employee at Ramp, set about hiring software engineers from the startup world, while Daniels began hiring lawyers. Today the startup employs about 19 people, including the founders.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe innovation here is in the tech and in the people,\u201d Sarihan said.<\/p>\n

The firm soft launched in January, the co-founders said, and it has already reviewed over 1,000 customer contracts \u2014 like MSAs, data processing agreements, and non-disclosure agreements \u2014 for fast-growing startups like Cursor and the sales automation startups<\/a> Clay and UnifyGTM.<\/p>\n

Sequoia\u2019s Josephine Chen and Alfred Lin led the seed round along with Bain Capital Ventures with participation from a bunch of angels like Ramp co-founders Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh, Opendoor co-founder Eric Wu, Casetext co-founder Jake Heller, Instacart co-founder Max Mullen, and the co-founders of Flatiron Health, Zach Weinberg and Gil Shlarski.<\/p>\n

The stars aligned for Crosby to land Sequoia as an investor. Chen knew Sarihan from Ramp. She had previously met him through the co-founder of Venue, an AI procurement startup she had backed and that was acquired by Ramp last year<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When the co-founders pitched their idea to Chen, she asked Sequoia\u2019s in-house lawyer about the idea, and that lawyer, Cindy Lee, knew Daniels from her time at Cooley.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we think about seed investing, for us, it\u2019s probably 70% around the team and 30% around the market, market dynamics, and the insight that the founders have there,\u201d Chen explained. Given all the connections she already had to the founding team and that legal work is a\u00a0$300 billion<\/a> industry, Chen was down to disrupt it with Crosby.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had seen, even in our own portfolio [companies], how negotiating contracts can be a bottleneck for growth,\u201d Chen said. Legal, in her view, is \u201ca bull\u2019s-eye case for the use of LLMs.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The tech industry talks a lot about how AI is going to transform work. Legal startup Crosby, which…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":192139,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,78559,78560,78558,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-192138","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-legal-services","11":"tag-legal-tech","12":"tag-sequoia","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114699703628938723","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192138\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}