Sandstone Secures $30 Million Series A to Transform In-House Legal Operations with AI

As legal AI startups such as Harvey and Legora continue attracting massive funding rounds, the legal technology sector has emerged as one of the most competitive areas in artificial intelligence. While many of these companies focus on law firms and private practice, Sandstone targets a different segment of the market it believes remains underserved.

The company announced a $30 million Series A funding round on Tuesday, aimed at helping in-house legal teams manage the growing complexity of their daily workflows, tasks, and systems.

The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors including Mantis VC, SV Angel, Operator Partners, Kearny Jackson, Daybreak Ventures, Litquidity Ventures, and others. The funding comes only six months after Sandstone raised a $10 million seed round led by Sequoia in January.

According to the founders, the company’s initial focus is on legal departments at small- and mid-sized businesses, where legal teams often juggle requests that arrive through multiple channels and platforms.

“They open up their laptop in the morning; they see all the work that’s come in through different intake channels, whether that’s Slack messages, emails, Jira,” said co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Jarryd Strydom. “AI helps them route and triage that work appropriately, and then they can build custom workflows on top of our platform to actually execute work, whether that’s drafting, reviewing, or providing legal analysis.”

Unlike AI legal platforms focused primarily on legal reasoning and research, Sandstone is centred on workflow management and operational automation. The company aims to streamline how internal legal teams organise and prioritise their work, rather than serve as a direct legal reasoning tool.

Strydom believes t that specialising in in-house legal operations gives Sandstone an advantage over broader AI products that often struggle to fit highly specific business workflows.

“One of the convictions of Lightspeed was that they really believe in highly specialised AI,” Strydom said. “Because it takes a granular understanding of workflows to really nail down how AI can help.”

Despite its specialisation, Sandstone will still face increasing competition from both legal-tech startups and major AI companies. Frontier AI Labs have begun expanding deeper into legal services, with Anthropic continuing to develop its Claude for Legal offering. In May, the company introduced additional capabilities for case law research and deposition preparation, highlighting the growing interest in AI-powered legal solutions.

As investment in legal AI continues to accelerate, Sandstone is betting that automation tailored specifically for in-house legal departments will carve out a valuable niche in an increasingly crowded market.