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Sandstone Launches with $10M Seed Led by Sequoia to Usher in the Era of AI-Native Legal Departments

Born out of the acute, shared frustration of legal veterans from places like McKinsey, Davis Polk, Paul Hastings, NetDocuments, Robin, Akin Gump, and Luminance, Sandstone launches to solve pain points of disparate information and repetitive work, turning institutional knowledge into live, agentic workflows.

NEW YORK, NY — January 13, 2026 — Sandstone, the first platform purpose-built to sync in-house legal teams with business stakeholders, today announced its launch and a $10 million seed round led by Sequoia, with participation from a group of top investors as well as over 20 GCs and legal services leaders.

The Shared Frustration: From Buried in Pings to Building the Foundation

The idea for Sandstone grew directly out of the collective frustration experienced by its founders and core team. They recognized 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, former in-house counsel at a fast-growing B2B software company, 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 He continued, “Each piece of work depended on some bit of institutional knowledge hidden in someone’s head or an outdated doc.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, who spent years at McKinsey leading the legal technology practice and building legal tech for major firms and Fortune 100 companies, 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."

The Transformation: Introducing The Legal Home

Sandstone is designed to be the platform for AI-native legal departments. Sandstone learns from your legal intelligence to execute work and simplify business orchestration.

“Our goal is not to replace legal expertise but to amplify it,” added Strydom, co-founder and COO. “We’re giving legal teams Sandstone to operationalize their playbooks, not just store 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:

  • Operationalize 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.

Empowering the Next Generation of Legal Leaders

Sandstone is built to help legal teams evolve into legal leaders, professionals who combine legal judgment with systems thinking. Through its marketplace of AI-enabled playbooks, legal teams can access and share workflow templates, document intelligence, and operational insights while retaining the unique context that defines their organization’s approach to risk and compliance.

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.

About Sandstone

Sandstone is designed for in-house legal teams. By enabling customizable legal agents that learn from every interaction, Sandstone transforms fragmented workflows into connected, contextual systems. Sandstone is headquartered in New York. To learn more visit www.sandstone.com and follow us on X, LinkedIn, and Substack.