# Crosby

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/crosby_ai
> Updated: 2026-06-08
> Categories: AI Companies, Legal AI
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> Cite as: AI Wiki. "Crosby." aiwiki.ai, 8 Jun 2026. https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/crosby_ai
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), the free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Reuse freely with attribution.

Crosby is an AI-native law firm based in New York City that pairs licensed attorneys with proprietary [artificial intelligence](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/artificial_intelligence) to review and negotiate commercial contracts, typically returning redlined results in under an hour. Unlike [legal AI](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/legal_ai) software vendors such as [Harvey](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/harvey) and [Legora](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/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](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/sequoia_capital).[1][4] It went on to raise a $20 million Series A led by [Index Ventures](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/index_ventures) in October 2025, and a $60 million Series B co-led by [Lux Capital](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/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]

## Overview

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]

## What Crosby is: an AI-native law firm

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](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/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]

## Founders and model

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](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/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](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/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 |

## Funding

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](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/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](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/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]

## Customers, scale, and significance

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](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/anysphere)), data-enrichment startup Clay, revenue-automation company Unify, voice-AI company [Cartesia](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/cartesia), and others such as [Baseten](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/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](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/harvey_ai) 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]

## References

1. Sacra. "Crosby funding, news and analysis." https://sacra.com/c/crosby/
2. Upstarts Media. "Crosby, 'AI Law Firm' Working With Startups Like Cursor, Raises $20 Million." https://www.upstartsmedia.com/p/crosby-ai-law-firm-raises-20-million
3. Bain Capital Ventures. "Crosby is Redefining Legal Work with AI-Powered Contract Automation." https://baincapitalventures.com/insight/crosby-is-redefining-legal-work-with-ai-powered-contract-automation/
4. TechCrunch. "Sequoia-backed Crosby launches a new kind of AI-powered law firm." June 17, 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/17/sequoia-backed-crosby-launches-a-new-kind-of-ai-powered-law-firm/
5. The Global Legal Post. "Cooley-backed contract review start-up Crosby raises $60m in fresh funding." https://www.globallegalpost.com/news/cooley-backed-contract-review-start-up-crosby-raises-60m-in-fresh-funding-1011864931
6. Artificial Lawyer. "Hybrid AI Law Firm, Crosby, Raises $20m, Cooley Invests." October 8, 2025. https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2025/10/08/hybrid-ai-law-firm-crosby-raises-20m-cooley-invests/
7. Law.com Legaltech News. "Legal Contracting Startup Crosby Secures $60M in Series B Round." March 31, 2026. https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2026/03/31/legal-contracting-startup-crosby-secures-60m-in-series-b-round/
8. Crosby. "Series B and Planting our Flag." https://crosby.ai/blog/series-b-planting-our-flag