• At law firms, the billable hour is the standard way to charge clients. But timekeeping is a pain.
• The startup PointOne says it's using AI to help lawyers auto-complete timesheets and bill more time.
• PointOne raised $16 million in a funding round led by the venture capital firm 8VC.

Tracking hours is part of how lawyers get paid. It's also the bane of the profession.

A startup called PointOne wants to eliminate the most tedious part of a lawyer's job. It says its AI-powered platform passively tracks a lawyer's computer activity and uses it to complete timesheets.

The company grew revenue tenfold since July, says PointOne cofounder Katon Luaces, after signing up dozens of law firm customers, ranging from a global 1,200-lawyer outfit to solo practitioners.

Investors are taking notice. After making a small earlier investment, the Joe Londsale-founded venture firm 8VC is leading a $16 million Series A round for PointOne, Luaces tells Business Insider. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator also participated.

Founders are flooding into legal tech, betting they can turn large language models into products law firms will trust — and competing for attention in an estimated $1 trillion industry.

Jack Moshkovich, an 8VC partner, said the market is crowded with companies trying to help lawyers do work faster. That leaves more whitespace, he said, on the operational side of the business.

Luaces isn't a lawyer. In 2019, he was a computer science major and a Google intern as the company's researchers were laying the groundwork for modern large language models.

He saw legal work as a natural target for the technology because so much of it is repetitive and text-heavy. By 2023, he and his roommate, Jeremy Ben-Meir, along with a third cofounder, Adrian Parlow, started sketching out an idea for a legal startup. (Parlow left PointOne last year and joined legal-tech giant Legora.)

When Luaces asked lawyers which part of the job they hated most, he kept hearing the same answer: timekeeping. At most law firms, the billable hour is the standard way to charge clients. Lawyers log the work they do for each client — often in six-minute increments — then tally those hours and bill accordingly. Many still track their hours in a spreadsheet or by hand on a legal pad.

PointOne's platform runs in the background as lawyers move between apps, then fills in time entries with the client, matter, a description of the work, and standardized legal codes.

Security and confidentiality are essential for law firms. Clients trust them with trade secrets and other closely held information, leaving little room for error from any software vendor.

When asked how lawyers feel about software watching them work, Luaces said their dislike of timekeeping helps overcome any discomfort. PointOne says it encrypts stored sensitive data, does not train models on firm data, and gives firms the option to use models in a private Azure environment.

For lawyers, "this is like magic beans," Luaces said.

Time savings aren't the point

Law firms are still working out how to use artificial intelligence to work faster without hurting their economics. Software that saves time can also reduce the number of hours a firm can bill.

PointOne, however, is not pitching itself as a way to save lawyers' time. Instead, it says it can help firms capture time that would otherwise go unbilled.

Some share of legal work never makes it into timesheets. Junior lawyers may undercount how long a task took, either because they're still learning or because they're embarrassed. More often, Luaces said, lawyers skip billing for small tasks because logging them takes almost as long as the work itself.

A lawyer might spend four minutes writing a client email. "I can either spend the next four minutes creating the time entry for it, or I can do more work," Luaces said. "Nine out of 10 times, everyone chooses to do more work."

He says the company's software can increase revenue by capturing billable time that would otherwise be lost.

PointOne isn't the only company making such promises. Its biggest competitor, Laurel, provides professional services firms with analytics about their operations, including time. It's raised over $150 million in funding since 2016, compared to PointOne's $20 million total.

PointOne wants to position itself for a broader shift in how legal work gets priced. Corporate clients are pushing back on soaring legal bills, and as artificial intelligence threatens to trim billable hours, firms are under pressure to test alternatives to hourly billing, including fixed fees for certain matters. Luaces said PointOne's data can help firms better understand the labor behind a matter, which in turn can help them price that work more precisely.

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• Buyers have been willing to pay a premium of up to 40% to buy Anduril shares.
• The steep markup reflects a two-tiered class for accessing stock in the hottest startups.
• Data from Caplight highlights a supply imbalance, with buyer demand surging to 97% while sellers' demand is at 3%.

Anduril hasn't even finalized its next funding round, and investors are already eager to pay up like it's a sold-out concert. As marquee venture firms Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz line up to back the defense tech startup at a reported $60 billion valuation, others shut out of the deal are scrambling to buy shares on secondary markets at steep premiums.

"Demand is so significant that buyers who have FOMO are willing to pay huge premiums for access," said Kelly Rodriques, CEO of Forge Global, a private marketplace exchange for shares of private companies like Anduril. "The company hates when this happens, but it happens."

The frenzy around investing in Anduril reflects the growing divide in private markets: access to the hottest startups is split between the VC firms that get in at a certain price and everyone else, forced to pay up on the sidelines. Anthropic has also seen a premium for secondary shares, though not as significant, said Rodriques.

Those investors shut out of the company's fundraising round are forced to buy via secondary markets, with existing stock in the company being sold by current or former employees or early investors. The rush for shares reminds Rodriques of buying tickets to see Taylor Swift on Stubhub when her concert sells out in minutes.

"It's scalping," he said.

Interested buyers have been willing to pay a premium of up to 40% above the $60 billion valuation to buy Anduril shares, according to Rodriques and Greg Martin, managing director and co-founder at Rainmaker Securities, another private marketplace exchange. The deals are not yet finalized because a willing seller and the company's blessing are still required.

"The magnitude of the premium is unusual," said Martin. "Usually we see premiums in the 5% to 15% range."

Anduril declined to comment for this story. Cofounders Palmer Luckey and Matt Grimm have loudly railed against unauthorized sales of the company's shares, publicly calling out some firms as "frauds."

"If I were an investor looking at this 'opportunity,' I'd run for the hills," Grimm posted in December. "Secondary markets are rife with fraud and bad actors, and it pains me to see these bottom feeders profiting off Anduril's growth while fleecing retail investors through unreasonable or opaque fee structures."

The founders have tightly controlled Andruil's stock, requiring would-be sellers to offer the company a first right of refusal to buy back those shares or assign the sale to a buyer of Andruil's choosing. The limited supply is a major reason shares have been among the hardest to obtain for any startup since last year, driving investor "frenzy."

Data from Caplight highlights a massive supply imbalance in the secondary market for Anduril stock, with buyer demand surging to 97% of total volume compared to just 3% from willing sellers—a stark shift from a 69-to-31 split in February.

If demand for Anduril shares is so high, the obvious question is: Why doesn't the company raise its share price to avoid leaving money on the table?

To explain, Rodriques went back to the analogy of a Taylor Swift concert or Nike shoes. Just because some people are willing to pay more does not mean the company wants to set its prices so high.

"It's the same reason Nike doesn't sell sneakers for $2000 if there's a secondary market for a hard-to-get sneaker," Rodriques said. "It's not in their best interest to charge their customers $2000 for a pair of shoes."

Similarly, Anduril would prefer to raise capital from its chosen VCs.

"The company has gotten to a $60 billion valuation by doing a very detailed and thorough job of working with some of the best investors in the world," he said.

• Eight salespeople from ServiceNow have jumped ship to rival startup Serval in recent months.
• Two of the salespeople cited fears about AI as their reason for leaving ServiceNow.
• ServiceNow's stock has tumbled 40% in the last six months in the so-called SaaS-pocalypse.

Eight salespeople from ServiceNow and its newly acquired subsidiary, Moveworks, have jumped ship to rival startup Serval in recent months, Business Insider has learned.

ServiceNow is a cloud computing software company whose stock has tumbled 40% in the last six months in the so-called SaaS-pocalypse, as investors fear AI could decimate the profit margins of software giants. In an effort to stay one step ahead in the AI race, ServiceNow closed an all-cash $2.85 billion acquisition of Moveworks in December to create an "AI-native front door."

The same month, Serval closed a $75 million Series B funding round led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the rapidly growing AI-powered IT support startup at $1 billion. Sequoia was also an early investor in ServiceNow.

Eight employees represent a fraction of ServiceNow's 29,000-person workforce. Still, the exodus shows how difficult it can be for tech companies with falling valuations to retain talent when buzzy, well-funded AI companies come calling. A ServiceNow spokesman declined to comment.

The highest-level departure is Brad Patterson, who had been a ServiceNow sales VP for nearly two years.

"AI is really making serious moves," Patterson said in an interview. "In a similar way, market sentiment is responding; I think people are responding in the same way."

Every incumbent tech company is facing a similar talent drain, according to Jules Levy, ServiceNow's former head of enterprise generative & enterprise AI, who is also among those joining Serval.

"I don't think this is unique to ServiceNow," he said in an interview. "Many folks within those incumbents are looking to jump to AI-native platforms that will be able to move really fast and take advantage of this technological wave."

"I think everyone's trying to figure out what comes next," he added.

Serval is not specifically targeting ServiceNow employees, but when one employee leaves, it can have a ripple effect, according to Tatiana Birgisson, Serval's chief operating officer.

"If you hire really good people, other really good people in their network want to follow them," she said, citing Chris Comes, who became a Serval VP of Sales in November after more than three years at MoveWorks. "Multiple people got excited about seeing the announcement of his going to Servo."

Startups have usually offered less job security and lower cash compensation than public tech companies, but Birgisson says tech downsizing has made it easier to recruit candidates.

Block CEO Jack Dorsey cut roughly 40% of his workforce in February, citing the rise of AI. Meta could reportedly lay off a fifth of its staff amid skyrocketing AI costs.

"Big Tech no longer feels as safe as it once did," Birgisson said. "We are starting to see more candidates who, 5-10 years ago, would not have considered working at a startup, but are now more open to it because there isn't the clear divide between 'secure' and 'risky' jobs."