Crosby Launches AI-Powered Law Firm to Transform Contract Review for Startups

Crosby launches an AI-powered law firm, backed by Sequoia Capital, with $5.8 million in seed funding. According to TechCrunch, Crosby is not just a tech company for lawyers; it is an actual law firm that uses its artificial intelligence tools to review legal contracts much faster than traditional methods.

Instead of selling software to law firms, Crosby has hired its lawyers who work with in-house AI to deliver contract review services. The company mainly serves startups, promising to review contracts in under an hour. According to the co-founder and CTO, John Sarihan, it plans to make this even faster, aiming for just a few minutes.

Sequoia-Backed Crosby Is Rethinking How Legal Services Work

Many companies are trying to create AI tools for lawyers to use, but Crosby has built its law firm from the ground up. The firm’s team includes both software engineers and lawyers who work together. Its lawyers use an internal AI system to speed up contract reviews. This mix of technology and human expertise allows the company to deliver legal work much faster than usual.

CTO John Sarihan, who previously worked at Ramp, led the engineering team. Co-founder and CEO Ryan Daniels, a lawyer with deep roots in the tech world, focused on building the legal team. Daniels had earlier worked at Cooley, one of the top legal firms for tech startups. He also served as general counsel at a fast-growing startup. He saw firsthand how contract work often became a major bottleneck that slowed down business growth.

He explained that in his previous company, he was the only person in the legal department. As the company scaled from 10 to 100 employees, most of his legal time was spent handling contracts, sales agreements, and master service agreements (MSAs). These routine legal tasks often delay deals and slow down the company’s overall progress. “Contract negotiations and legal review were the reason why we weren’t growing as fast as we wanted to,” Daniels said.

When he and Sarihan decided to launch Crosby, they agreed that real change would only come if they owned the full legal service experience. That meant not just building tools but becoming a law firm themselves. They launched quietly in January, and since then, Crosby has already reviewed more than 1,000 contracts for growing companies like Cursor, Clay, and UnifyGTM.

Crosby’s AI Law Firm Launch Attracts Strong Investor Interest

The launch of Crosby’s AI law firm has attracted major attention from investors. Sequoia Capital led the seed funding, with partners Josephine Chen and Alfred Lin joining the round. Bain Capital Ventures and several prominent angel investors also participated, including co-founders from Ramp, Opendoor, Instacart, Casetext, and Flatiron Health.

Sequoia’s interest in Crosby was reinforced by strong tech ties and confidence in the team. Josephine Chen had worked with CTO John Sarihan at Ramp and had backed another AI startup acquired by Ramp. When evaluating Crosby, she checked with Sequoia’s legal team, where their lawyer already knew CEO Ryan Daniels from Cooley. Highlighting the tech potential, Chen said, “Legal is a bull’s-eye case for the use of LLMs.”

The legal industry is huge, worth around $300 billion, and still largely untouched by AI. By bringing together fast legal work and smart software, the AI-driven legal firm by Crosby hopes to change that. Its system is designed so that AI handles standard legal review tasks, while human lawyers deal with the parts that need judgment and negotiation. This allows Crosby to deliver reliable legal work faster and more affordably than traditional firms.

Crosby’s co-founders believe that their end-to-end control of both the technology and the legal service gives them a major advantage. Sarihan summed it up simply: “The innovation here is in the tech and in the people.”

With a small but growing team of 19 people, Crosby plans to keep scaling as demand from startups increases. As their software improves and review times continue to drop, Crosby could become a key legal partner for startups that want to move fast and stay compliant.