Robert Ambrogi Blog
Just four months ago in an article here, I caught up with founder and CEO Ryan Alshak for an update on Laurel, the company that provides automated time capture and analytics for law firms and other professional services firms. I first met Alshak in 2017, when his then startup won the very first Startup Alley, the startup pitch competition I coordinate at ABA Techshow, and in my recent post, I wrote that Laurel “offers startups a vision of what is possible.”
That proved more prescient than I could have known, as Laurel today announced that it has raised $100 million in Series C funding in a round led by the technology venture capital firm IVP, with participation from GV (Google Ventures).
Laurel said it will use this investment to scale its AI timekeeping platform and accelerate its development to solve what it calls the “time intelligence challenge” — the inability of knowledge-based businesses to accurately map time to business outcomes.
Related: Time By Ping Raises $36.5M Series B; Exclusive LawNext Interview with CEO Ryan Alshak.
In addition to IVP and GV, new investors in the round — which consists of primary and secondary funding — also include 01.a, created by the former CEO and COO of Twitter and CRO of Facebook; DST Global; Kevin Weil, CPO at OpenAI; Alexis Ohanian; Vladimir Fedorov, CTO at GitHub; Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder of Dropbox; and Hans Tung. Returning as investors in this round were ACME, Anthos, Gokul Rajaram, AIX Ventures, and Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures.
As I wrote in my February post, the company — originally called Time By Ping — has come a long way since its 2016 founding. The first to use AI to automate time capture for lawyers, it has expanded beyond legal into the accounting and consulting sectors.
Named 700th on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S. last year, the company reports 300% year-over-year growth, with its accounting business now representing one-half of its operations. Its customers include more than 100 of the top legal, accounting, and consulting firms across the U.S., U.K., E.U., Australia and Canada.
Read more about Laurel in the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.
Ajay Vashee, general partner at IVP, said that Laurel has identified one of the largest efficiency gaps in the modern economy and its market opportunity is massive.
“Professional services represent trillions in global economic activity, yet these firms operate without basic visibility into their core resource – time,” Vashee said. “By solving the time intelligence challenge, Laurel creates a platform for broader AI transformation.
Founder Alshak, in a statement announcing the funding, said that legal and accounting firms have failed to map the input of time to the value of the outcomes produced, with the result that “the supply chain of knowledge work … has never been surfaced.”
“This funding helps us solve this fundamental challenge while giving firms the data foundation they need to deploy AI strategically,” Alshak said. “We’re not just automating time — we’re creating the time intelligence layer that will transform how all knowledge industries operate.”
To read more about Laurel and Alshak, see my February post or listen to my 2022 LawNext podcast interview with Alshak.