In a bold move to redefine how legal services work in the age of AI, Crosby, a new startup backed by Sequoia Capital, has officially launched with a groundbreaking twist: it’s not just selling AI software to lawyers — it is the law firm.

Fresh out of stealth mode, Crosby revealed a $5.8 million seed round led by Sequoia’s Josephine Chen and Alfred Lin, alongside Bain Capital Ventures and a roster of influential angels including Ramp co-founders Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh, Opendoor’s Eric Wu, Casetext’s Jake Heller, and Instacart’s Max Mullen. The startup’s mission? To deliver lightning-fast contract reviews and cut down the legal bottlenecks that have long slowed down fast-growing companies.

Co-founder and CEO Ryan Daniels, a seasoned lawyer and the son of two law professors, knows these pain points all too well. During his years as in-house counsel for startups, Daniels found that contract negotiations often choked company growth, eating up precious time that could be spent closing deals and scaling teams.

“My last company, where I was the only legal person, grew from 10 to 100 people, and contracts were the main drag on speed,” Daniels shared. Frustrated by traditional workflows, Daniels joined forces with CTO John Sarihan, an early Ramp engineer, to tackle the problem at its core.

Their solution was radical: build a law firm from scratch and power it end-to-end with Crosby’s own AI. Rather than licensing software to big firms, Crosby hires its own lawyers who work hand-in-hand with proprietary AI tools, guaranteeing contracts can be reviewed in under an hour — and they aim to push that to just minutes soon.

Since a quiet soft launch in January, Crosby’s lean team of 19 has already reviewed over 1,000 customer contracts for promising startups like Cursor, and sales tech companies Clay and UnifyGTM. The firm specializes in reviewing MSAs (master service agreements), data processing agreements, and NDAs, tackling some of the most time-consuming legal hurdles in B2B deals.

Sequoia’s Josephine Chen, who knew Sarihan from Ramp and had a trusted connection with Daniels through Sequoia’s in-house counsel Cindy Lee, quickly saw the opportunity. Legal work is a $300 billion industry ripe for AI disruption, Chen noted, adding that contract negotiations are a “bull’s-eye case for the use of LLMs” (large language models).

She explained, “When we think about seed investing, for us, it’s 70% about the team and 30% about the market. With Crosby, the stars aligned: a painful, massive market and a founding team we trusted completely.”

With Sequoia and Bain’s backing, Crosby plans to scale its hybrid legal-AI workforce, enhance its models, and bring its speed advantage to even more startups desperate to close deals faster than ever.

If successful, Crosby might not just make contract lawyers sweat — it could rewrite the blueprint for how the legal industry itself works in an AI-first era.

Mach Industries, the two-year-old rising star in the defense technology world, has officially confirmed a new $100 million funding round, pushing its valuation to an impressive $470 million. TechCrunch had previously hinted at the deal last month, and now it’s official: Khosla Ventures’ Keith Rabois and Bedrock Capital’s Geoff Lewis are leading the charge, with continued support from existing heavyweight investor Sequoia Capital.

This fresh capital injection brings Mach’s total raised to a solid $185 million to date — not bad for a startup founded in 2023 by then 19-year-old Ethan Thornton, who famously dropped out of MIT to go all in on defense innovation. Despite the buzz, the new valuation signals tempered optimism: Mach’s last round valued it at $335 million, so the new deal represents only a modest bump of about $35 million over a year and a half.

Still, the startup’s breakneck rise has been remarkable. Thornton, who once built his company’s first office furniture out of Home Depot plywood, now oversees a powerhouse team that grew from 20 to 140 employees in just twelve months.

Mach Industries has developed three headline-grabbing systems so far:

• Viper, a jet-powered vertical takeoff and landing UAV that needs no runway.
• Glide, a high-altitude glider capable of striking distant targets near the edge of the atmosphere.
• Stratos, an in-air satellite designed for extreme altitudes with advanced sensors and communications tech.

The Pentagon and other defense bodies are taking notice. Earlier this year, the Army Applications Laboratory selected Mach to build a vertical takeoff precision cruise missile, and the company unveiled plans for its first large-scale production hub — a 115,000-square-foot factory in Huntington Beach, California.

Thornton admits the dizzying growth comes with high stakes. The young CEO remains acutely aware of the ethical and geopolitical implications of building next-gen weapons, especially as conflicts like Ukraine’s drone warfare reshape modern battlefields.

“We’re creating weapons with the ability to strike at very long ranges,” Thornton says. But he’s quick to note that everything happens in direct coordination with the State Department, Department of Defense, and members of Congress.

With new funding secured, Mach plans to beef up its manufacturing muscle and double down on R&D. While Thornton keeps the details close to the vest, he hints at a new type of propulsion engine currently under wraps.

For a company that started with plywood desks, Mach Industries’ explosive trajectory proves that scrappiness, ambition, and an appetite for risk can still shake up the world’s most guarded industry. And with $100 million more in its arsenal, the next chapter promises even more game-changing tech on the battlefield.