Sandstone has raised $30 million in Series A funding to build AI software for in-house legal teams. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and comes six months after Sandstone raised a $10 million seed round led by Sequoia.
The company focuses on legal departments at small and mid-sized businesses, rather than private law firms. Sandstone describes its platform in its official blog as a workspace for managing legal requests, workflows, and institutional knowledge.
Sandstone Targets Corporate Legal Work
Sandstone is designed to help in-house legal teams manage work that arrives through tools such as Slack, email, and Jira. Co-founder and chief operating officer Jarryd Strydom told TechCrunch that AI helps route and triage those requests.
The platform also lets legal teams build custom workflows for drafting, review, and legal analysis. Rather than acting mainly as a legal reasoning system, Sandstone focuses on workflow automation and relationship management for corporate legal teams.
Sandstone’s early customers are expected to be legal departments that handle overlapping requests across different business teams. The company says its product is built by legal experts and general counsels for modern in-house legal teams.
Lightspeed Leads Series A Round
Lightspeed led the Series A, with participation from Sequoia, Mantis VC, SV Angel, Operator Partners, Kearny Jackson, Daybreak Ventures, Litquidity Ventures, and others. Sequoia also led Sandstone’s $10 million seed round in January.
Strydom said Lightspeed backed Sandstone partly because of its focus on specialized vertical AI. He said legal workflows require a granular understanding of how teams operate before AI can be useful.
Legal AI Competition Expands
Sandstone is entering a legal AI market that includes fast-growing companies such as Harvey and Legora. Those companies focus more on private practice, while Sandstone is targeting in-house legal operations.
The company may also face competition from major AI labs. Anthropic has been expanding Claude for Legal, adding tools in May for case law search and deposition preparation.
Featured image credits: Sandstone
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