Crosby
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Last reviewed
Jun 8, 2026
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Crosby is an AI-native law firm based in New York City that pairs licensed attorneys with proprietary artificial intelligence to review and negotiate commercial contracts, typically returning redlined results in under an hour. Unlike legal AI software vendors such as Harvey and Legora, which sell tools to existing law firms, Crosby is itself a law firm: it employs the lawyers, owns the workflow, and uses AI to scale their output. The company is frequently cited as an early test case for the "services-as-software" or "AI-native professional services" model, in which a startup delivers a regulated service directly rather than licensing software to incumbents.[1][2][3]
Crosby came out of stealth in June 2025 with a $5.8 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital.[1][4] It went on to raise a $20 million Series A led by Index Ventures in October 2025, and a $60 million Series B co-led by Lux Capital and Index Ventures, reported around the end of March and into April 2026 at a valuation of approximately $400 million.[5][6][7]
Crosby focuses on high-volume, comparatively low-complexity contract work for fast-growing technology companies: mutual non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), master service agreements (MSAs), and data processing agreements (DPAs), among other sales and vendor contracts.[1][4] Customers submit a contract through a messaging interface (commonly Slack, but also email and webhooks), and Crosby's combination of AI and in-house lawyers returns a reviewed and redlined document, often with a commentary table and suggested negotiation responses, on a turnaround measured in minutes to hours rather than days.[1][3]
The company positions its offering against two alternatives that it argues both serve clients poorly for this kind of work: large "white-shoe" firms that bill upward of $1,000 per hour, and slow manual review.[3] Index Ventures and Crosby's founders describe the target as an "$18 billion and growing" market for high-volume, repeatable legal work that startups in particular struggle to access affordably.[3]
A defining feature of Crosby is its legal structure. Rather than selling software, the business is organized as a dual entity: a technology company (reported as Crosby Legal Inc.) builds the AI platform, and a licensed law firm (reported as Crosby Legal PLLC) employs attorneys and delivers the actual legal services, complete with malpractice insurance.[1][6] Every AI-generated output is reviewed by a licensed lawyer before it reaches the client.[1] This means the firm itself, not a piece of software, is the product, and AI functions as leverage that lets a small team of lawyers handle far more volume than a conventional practice.
The intake and routing workflow runs through an internal system that Crosby calls Bailiff. When a contract arrives, Bailiff ingests it, assesses priority and target turnaround time, and routes it to the appropriate lawyer within seconds.[1] The firm's AI software, built on large language model technology, then parses the document and compares each clause against a library of market-standard terms, drafting suggested redlines and flagging exceptions so that lawyers can concentrate on the higher-stakes judgment calls.[1][6] Public reporting indicates the firm reduced its review times rapidly after launch, for example from an initial 24-hour cycle to 12 hours "in short order," and later to a median turnaround of roughly 58 minutes.[2][3]
The choice to operate as the firm rather than a vendor is also a strategic one. Index Ventures partner Jahanvi Sardana has framed the distinction in terms of incentives and conflict: a company selling AI tools to law firms "would end up competing with your end customer," and time-based billing penalizes lawyers who use software to finish work faster.[2] Crosby avoids that by employing the lawyers directly and charging by the contract rather than by the hour.[2][3]
Crosby was founded around 2024 to 2025 by Ryan Daniels and John Sarihan; sources differ on whether to date the company from its 2024 soft launch or its formal 2025 emergence from stealth, and on the precise founding year.[1][2][4] (The starting brief's reference to a co-founder named "John Sun" appears to be an error; reporting consistently names John Sarihan.)
Ryan Daniels (CEO) is a lawyer and the son of two law professors. He is a former associate at the technology-focused firm Cooley and spent close to a decade as in-house and general counsel at early-stage startups, including roles associated with A.Team and HiredScore, often as the only legal person as a company scaled.[2][4][6] John Sarihan (CTO) is an engineer who spent roughly four years at fintech company Ramp, rising from software engineer to tech lead, where he focused on automating complex workflows; he assembled Crosby's engineering team from the startup world.[4][6]
The business model replaces the traditional billable hour with predictable, volume-based pricing: clients are charged per contract reviewed (reported as a fixed fee on the order of several hundred dollars per document), which the founders describe as turning legal work from a variable, unpredictable expense into a reliable operating function while aligning the firm's incentives with the customer's.[1][2][3] The model is built for repeatable, high-volume contract review rather than bespoke litigation or complex deal counsel.
The table below summarizes Crosby's disclosed funding history.
| Round | Date reported | Amount | Lead investor(s) | Selected other participants |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | June 2025 | $5.8M | Sequoia Capital | Bain Capital Ventures; angels including Ramp's Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh, Casetext's Jake Heller |
| Series A | October 2025 | $20M | Index Ventures | Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil, Cooley, Patrick Collison |
| Series B | March to April 2026 | $60M | Lux Capital and Index Ventures (co-leads) | Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Elad Gil, 01 Advisors |
Crosby announced a $5.8 million seed round in June 2025, led by Sequoia Capital (partners Josephine Chen and Alfred Lin), with co-lead participation from Bain Capital Ventures and a roster of operator angels that included Ramp co-founders Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh, Opendoor co-founder Eric Wu, Casetext co-founder Jake Heller, and Instacart co-founder Max Mullen.[1][4]
In October 2025, the company raised a $20 million Series A led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, angel investor Elad Gil, Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, and, notably, the law firm Cooley, where Daniels had previously worked.[5][6] Cooley's investment drew attention because it placed an established law firm as a backer of a company widely framed as a competitor to traditional legal services.[6]
Reporting at the end of March 2026 and into early April 2026 described a $60 million Series B co-led by Lux Capital and Index Ventures, with Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Elad Gil, and 01 Advisors also participating, at a valuation of approximately $400 million.[5][7][8] At the time of that round, Crosby said the cumulative value of contracts it had negotiated for clients had climbed to more than $1 billion, up from about $30 million when it emerged from stealth less than a year earlier, with the company citing roughly 400% revenue growth.[5][7] Across the three announced rounds, Crosby has raised on the order of $85 million; exact totals depend on which rounds are counted and how follow-on participation is reported, so figures here are attributed to the cited reporting.[5]
Crosby soft-launched in late 2024 / early 2025 and reported reviewing more than 1,000 customer contracts in its first months.[4] Disclosed customers skew toward fast-growing technology and go-to-market companies, including the AI coding company behind the Cursor editor (Anysphere), data-enrichment startup Clay, revenue-automation company Unify, voice-AI company Cartesia, and others such as Baseten and Polymarket.[1][4][6] As the firm scaled, it reported a median turnaround near 58 minutes, throughput of roughly 1,000 contracts every three weeks (versus an estimated 173 days for the same volume at launch), about 90% of requests resolved within a few hours, and month-over-month customer growth around 30%, supported by a team of roughly two dozen lawyers.[1][2][6]
Crosby's significance lies less in any single contract-review feature than in its organizational bet. It is among the most-cited early examples of "services-as-software": instead of selling AI tools to professionals, the company productizes the service itself and uses AI to scale labor inside a regulated structure.[2][3] This contrasts directly with the dominant legal-AI playbook of vendors like Harvey and Legora, which build software sold to law firms and in-house teams; Crosby instead competes mainly with legal-process outsourcers and small contract-focused boutiques, and explicitly aims to replace time-based billing with execution-based pricing.[2][3] The model has attracted scrutiny as well as capital, since an AI-native firm raises questions about lawyer oversight, professional responsibility, and unauthorized-practice-of-law rules that software vendors can largely sidestep, which is one reason the dual-entity, lawyer-in-the-loop structure is central to how Crosby describes itself.[1][6]