Sandstone Raises $10m Seed Led By Sequoia For Inhouse AI Agents

Sandstone, a new legal AI platform designed to turn institutional knowledge into agentic workflows for inhouse teams, has raised a $10m Seed round led by Sequoia, with participation from over 20 GCs and legal sector experts. (See AL Interview with CEO Nick Fleisher below.)

The start-up will offer inhouse teams an AI system that is ‘continuously learning from every interaction to build dynamic playbooks’. It will also help teams to:

• ‘Turn scattered institutional knowledge into live, agentic workflows.
• Deploy their own legal agents in under ten minutes, automating intake, triage, and workflows directly across the systems business teams already use: Slack, Salesforce, and email.’
• And, create ‘context-in-motion’ – Sandstone connects every workflow to the business context that drives it, ‘creating competitive advantage as expertise is shared, preserved, and applied consistently across the team’.

And in terms of who they are, co-founder Jarryd Strydom, is a lawyer with inhouse experience and a management consultant, and spent time at McKinsey on legal ops projects. Meanwhile, Fleisher spent several years at McKinsey leading the legal technology practice. Other top team members include: Jennifer Poon (NetDocuments, Akin Gump), Bo Xiang (Paul Hastings, GC-turned-engineer), and Devon Willitts (Davis Polk, Lead Legal Engineer at Robin AI). In short, an experienced group focused on solving inhouse legal needs with AI, agents and workflows.

They explained that the idea for Sandstone grew directly out of their collective frustration with how inhouse legal teams ‘kept running into the same problems: disparate information, answering the same questions, writing the same clauses, and a constant focus on process instead of progress’.

Strydom noted: ‘Every day, I was buried under Slack pings, procurement tickets, and redlines. Each piece of work depended on some bit of institutional knowledge hidden in someone’s head or an outdated doc. It was clear the systems were failing.’

And Sandstone is seeking to solve this problem, or as Bogomil Balkansky, partner at Sequoia, commented: ‘Nick and Jarryd’s combined experience, Nick serving inhouse legal teams at McKinsey and Jarryd living the problem as inhouse counsel, uniquely positions them to transform institutional knowledge into live, intelligent workflows. Their speed from founding to impact has been remarkable, and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with them.’

And now the AL Interview with CEO, Nick Fleisher, (pictured above)

What does this mean to you to get funding from such prestigious investors?

We are thrilled to have the support of such great investors and partners. Sequoia, Kearny Jackson, SV Angel, as well as other investors and the many GCs and lawyers, recognize the opportunity to empower in-house teams. I think it also speaks to the remaining opportunity that still exists. Most legal teams do not have business context figured out — and we want to partner with them to solve that. Every day we talk to dozens of teams without legal tech solutions yet, and investor interest is a testament to that remaining gap.

We see these investors as critical capital and strategic partners to help us reach more legal teams and build a widespread communities for in-house lawyers who want to become even more strategic and minimize admin work.

Where does Sandstone fit into the legal AI ecosystem today?

Sandstone is the central hub for in-house legal teams. We envision a world where legal departments open their laptops every day and use Sandstone to align on what they’re working on, and what their AI agents are supporting on.

Sandstone embeds into the tools teams already use, so there is no less of a need to switch between tools like Gmail, Slack, Ironclad, and business systems (like Salesforce). All the relevant context legal teams need is extracted from these sources and embedded directly into your workflow. We are continuing to invest in making these integration connections as simple and customizable as possible, while reaching new avenues like meeting notes, ERPs, and more.

Sandstone acts as more than just a task and document repository; it actually creates a personalized context graph that helps you execute work, from first-pass redlines and replying to comments to answering complex legal questions. Ultimately, Sandstone eliminates the ‘context-switching tax’ that slows teams down.

Who is your ideal client?

Sandstone is built for legal departments who find they spend to much time buried in admin work and searching for context. For legal departments with a growing demand from the business and a need to ‘hack the system’ to become proactive instead of reactive.

We work with dozens of in-house teams from fast-growth startups to global F500 enterprises, including across range of industries like software, consumer, financial services, and manufacturing.

Why did you choose to move into legal AI?

In leading a lot of McKinsey’s legal tech work, I spent most of my time with Am Law firms and in-house teams, and realized a majority of the focus on was on big firms. Jarryd lived the problem firsthand as in-house counsel at a fast-growing B2B software company, spending his days buried under Slack pings, procurement tickets, and redlines.

When we talked to our in-house clients, we realized there was a major gap in the market. We were both also engineers who used tools like Jira and Linear, and realized these could be super helpful for legal teams. We started with a Kanban board for lawyers, and quickly expanded to what Sandstone is today.

And, more broadly where do you see the legal AI market heading now, and where will Sandstone be within this future landscape in a year or two?

The legal AI market is shifting from one-size-fits-all to solutions that deeply understand your individual context. While the last year for in-house was about testing chatbots and plugins, the next two years will be about moving toward context-armed agents—autonomous systems that don’t just talk in siloes to LLMs, but actually execute complex workflows and make sense of vast sets of data.

We see the market moving away from fragmented ‘point solutions’ that force lawyers to jump between tabs. Within this future landscape, Sandstone will be the definitive operating system for in-house teams. We are the centralized intelligence layer where every legal request, from intake and triage to final execution, is managed and eventually executed. Our goal is to make AI an invisible but essential part of the workflow, effectively eliminating the administrative ‘tax’ on legal teams.

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Thanks and congrats on the raise.

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More about Sandstone here.

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And here’s a full list of investors:

• Sequoia, Kearny Jackson, SV Angel, Webb Investment Network (Maynard Webb), Mantis VC (The Chainsmokers), Antiportfolio Ventures (Ryan Morgan, David Fox), Daybreak Ventures (Rex Woodbury)
• Over 20 GCs from companies including eBay and Bilt, as well as other founders and investors: Operator Partners (Founders of Flatiron Health), Freddy Kerrest (Okta), Scott McNealy (Sun Microsystems), Zach Abramowitz (Killer Whale Strategies), Raji Arasu (CTO, Autodesk).