Sandstone, the first platform purpose-built to sync in-house legal teams with business stakeholders, announced its launch and a $10 million seed round led by Sequoia, with participation from a group of top investors and over 20 GCs and legal services leaders.
The idea for Sandstone grew directly out of the collective frustration experienced by its founders and core team. They recognised that across in-house legal departments, 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.
Co-founder Jarryd Strydom lived the problem firsthand. “Every day, I was buried under Slack pings, procurement tickets, and redlines.” He continued, “Each piece of work depended on some bit of institutional knowledge hidden in someone’s head or an outdated doc.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.”
Co-founder Nick Fleisher also observed the same pain point at scale. “A lack of context consistently created bottlenecks at every layer of every company I worked with. In-house legal teams actually want transformation. The right tool had not been built yet.”
Sandstone is built for elite legal teams by elite legal teams. The founding and core team includes veterans like Jennifer Poon (NetDocuments, Akin Gump), Bo Xiang (Paul Hastings, GC-turned-engineer), and Devon Willitts (Davis Polk, Lead Legal Engineer at Robin), who bring years of in-house experience to the product’s design, alongside legal engineers from top companies and firms like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and AI research labs.
“What sets Sandstone apart is that it’s built by in-house experts for in-house teams,” said Bogomil Balkansky, partner at Sequoia. “Nick and Jarryd’s combined experience – Nick serving in-house legal teams at McKinsey and Jarryd living the problem as in-house 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.”
Sandstone is continuously learning from every interaction to build dynamic playbooks and turn scattered institutional knowledge into live, agentic workflows. Sandstone enables teams to:
- Operationalise Expertise: 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.
- Create Context-in-Motion: Sandstone connects every workflow to the business context that drives it. This turns “context in motion” into a competitive advantage as expertise is shared, preserved, and applied consistently across the team.
Sandstone is already partnering with dozens of in-house teams, from fast-growing startups to Fortune 500s. Early customers report dramatic reductions in turnaround time, increased visibility into bottlenecks, and measurable ROI as context compounds across use cases.
