Crosby just came out of stealth with $5.8M to shake up legal work using AI—and it’s not selling tools to lawyers. It is actually a law firm that uses its own AI tech to speed up contract review.
Instead of software-only, Crosby hires lawyers who run their AI internally. They promise contract review in under an hour, with hopes to cut that to minutes, co-founder and CTO John Sarihan told TechCrunch.
Co-founder Ryan Daniels, a lawyer with startup general counsel experience, says contract review has been a growth bottleneck at previous companies. 
“My 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,” Daniels said.
Contract negotiation is still a human-to-human slog that takes weeks or months. Crosby believes owning the entire process, not just selling AI tools, is key.
Sarihan hired software engineers from the startup world. Daniels recruited lawyers. The team has about 19 people now.
“The innovation here is in the tech and in the people,” Sarihan said.
Crosby soft-launched in January and has reviewed over 1,000 contracts for startups like Cursor, Clay, and UnifyGTM.
Sequoia led the seed round with Bain Capital Ventures and big-name angels like the co-founders of Ramp, Opendoor, Casetext, Instacart, and Flatiron Health.
Sequoia’s Josephine Chen connected to the founders through prior work networks.
“When we think about seed investing, for us, it’s probably 70% around the team and 30% around the market, market dynamics, and the insight that the founders have there,” Chen said.
She sees legal contract work as a prime use case for large language models.
“We had seen, even in our own portfolio [companies], how negotiating contracts can be a bottleneck for growth,” Chen said. Legal, in her view, is “a bull’s-eye case for the use of LLMs.”
