The technology industry says a lot about how AI intends to remodel work. Legal startup CosbyWho has just come out of the root of seeds with a value of $ 5.8 million led by Sequoia, perhaps the most extreme example of what is coming so far.
Crosby not only creates AI software for lawyers – although it does. Crosby is an actual law firm using artificial intelligence to offer legal services at speeds before.
Instead of selling technology to lawyers, Crosby hired lawyers who use its internally developed AI software. It sells legal services, mainly startups. The company currently guarantees that AI software, with supervisors, can view a new customer’s contract in lower than an hour. And he hopes that it’s going to fall even faster-maybe to only a few minutes, in line with his co-founder John Sarihan, who talked to TechCrunch.
Ryan Daniels, co -founder and general director of Crosby, is the lawyer and son of two law professors. He cut his teeth in Cooley, one of the largest corporations representing the technology industry. Then he spent most of the decade, working a legal advisor for startups.
“My last company, in which I used to be the only legal person, grew from about 10 to 100 people and I discovered that I spent most of the time on legal contracts, sales contracts, [and] MSA – said Daniels, referring to part of the client’s agreement referred to as a predominant service agreement.
Contract negotiations and legal review were such a bottleneck in the company that they were “the reason why we did not grow as fast as we wanted.”
Today, contract negotiations remain a human process to a human, which can take weeks or months.
Although there are more and more AI tools that help lawyers speed up parts of their work, the founders of Crosby thought that the only method to use artificial intelligence to essentially change the legal industry was “building their own legal company to have the whole process, ending,” said Daniels.
Sarihan, who was an early worker in Ramp, decided to employ software engineers from the startup world, while Daniels began employing lawyers. Today, the startup employs about 19 people, including the founders.
“Innovation here is in technology and peoples,” said Sarihan.
Co-founders, in January, the company was launched in January in January, gave it, and has already reviewed over 1000 contracts with clients-as MSA, contracts for data processing and information non-discharge agreements-in the case of rapidly developing startups, akin to Cursor and startups for the automation of sales sales and unifygtm.
Josephine Chen and Alfred Lin from Sequoia led a round of seeds with the participation of Bain Capital Ventures and a number of angels, akin to RAMA co -founders, Eric Gliman and Karim Atiyeh, co -founder of OpenDoor Eric Wu, co -founder of Casetext, Jake Heller, co -founder of Instacart, Max Mullen, co -founder Flatiron, Zach Weinberg and Gil Shrarsi.
The stars leveled Crosby to Land Sequoia as an investor. Chen knew Sarihana from Ramps, and earlier she met Daniels through the co -founder of Venue, the startup of AI, who supported and was acquired by the ramp last 12 months.
When the co -founders put their idea for Chen, she asked the internal lawyer of Sequoia about the idea, and this lawyer, Cindy Lee, knew Daniels from his stay in Cooley.
“When we think about investing seeds, for us it is probably 70% around the band and 30% around the market, market dynamics and insight that the founders have there,” explained Chen. Considering all connections she had with the founding team and this legal work That’s $ 300 billion Industry, Chen was imagined to disturb him by Crosby.
“We saw, even in our own portfolio [companies]How negotiating contracts can be a bottleneck for development, “Chen, in her opinion, said,” a bull’s case for the use of LLM. ”