SAN FRANCISCO — Laurel, which bills itself as the world’s first AI Time platform, has raised $100 million in Series C funding led by IVP, with participation from GV (Google Ventures). Laurel plans to use this investment to scale its AI time platform and accelerate to solve what it calls the “time intelligence challenge”—the inability for knowledge industries to accurately map time to business outcomes. In the age of AI, quantifying and understanding human capital goes from a “nice to have” to a “cannot exist without” for enterprises.
In addition to IVP and GV, new investors in the round, which consists of primary and secondary funding, also include: 01.a (created by former CEO and COO of Twitter & CRO of Facebook), DST Global, Kevin Weil (CPO @ OpenAI), Alexis Ohanian, Vladimir Fedorov (CTO @ GitHub), Arash Ferdowsi (co-founder of Dropbox), and Hans Tung. These investors join returning investors ACME, Anthos, Gokul Rajaram, AIX Ventures, and Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures.
The funding comes as Laurel experiences rapid adoption among enterprise professional services firms like Ernst & Young, Grant Thornton, Freshfields, and Crowell & Moring. Over the last 12 months, Laurel grew ARR +300% at double-digit scale, increased usage by +500%, and works with +100 of the top legal, accounting, and consulting firms across US, UK, EU, Australia, and Canada.
Laurel’s AI Time platform, now leveraged by hundreds of the world’s top enterprise professional service firms, uses AI to automatically categorize, describe, and analyze how professionals spend their time on admin work. The platform’s ability to connect time data with business outcomes has proven transformative for firms looking to maximize profits, allocate their resources effectively, and understand exactly what workflows to apply AI to and what agents to automate.
Customers using the company’s AI-native time platform report profit increases between 4-11%—driven by an additional 28 billable minutes per day per professional, and increased realization of 1-4%. Laurel’s ROI methodology has been independently audited and validated by a Big-4 Firm. The platform currently processes over $5B in gross market value for its customers, and +$360M of that amount is net-new value attributable to Laurel. In addition, Laurel saves its professionals up to 80% in time recording, freeing them to work on high-leverage work.
“Laurel uniquely delivers value across lawyers, clients, finance, and marketing by streamlining time capture, enriching narratives, and accelerating accurate billing,” says David Cunningham, Chief Innovation Officer at global law firm Reed Smith. “As firms assess the impact of AI and fixed fees, gaining granular intelligence with less effort is essential to redefining value within a firm and for its clients.”
“I’ve seen first-hand how Laurel can transform our approach to time intelligence. What used to be a manual process of time-keeping and entry is now significantly technology enabled,” says Matt Newnes, Partner and Tax Transformation leader at Ernst & Young. “Laurel doesn’t just help our people to capture time that they spend on work more comprehensively; it helps us to understand much more about how our teams work allowing us to identify best practices to help ensure we always drive the best outcomes for our clients. It has proven to be one of our most impactful AI investments, delivering measurable results while laying the foundation for broader transformation initiatives.”
Automating time is Laurel’s first step. Laurel’s AI platform turns its proprietary data around work and time to address the #1 business problem impacting knowledge industries: operating without visibility into their supply chain.
“Nobody has ever mapped the input of time to the output of outcomes. Industries like legal and accounting are best at understanding their input (time), but still struggle to price value. On the flip side, industries like consulting and financial services understand value, but operate blind to the true cost of creation. While all other industries have been obsessed about optimizing their supply chain, the supply chain of knowledge work—which represents over 50% of Global GDP—has never been surfaced. This funding helps us solve this fundamental challenge while giving firms the data foundation they need to deploy AI strategically. We’re not just automating time—we’re creating the time intelligence layer that will transform how all knowledge industries operate,” says Ryan Alshak, founder and CEO of Laurel.
