AI Timekeeping Startup Laurel Raised 100 Million to Find Out Where the Time Goes

The average knowledge worker puts in nine hours a day. But only three of those hours actually move the needle.

Ryan Alshak has built a company around that statistic, one that’s less about work optimization and more about confronting a deeper, more existential question. Where does all our time go?

For most industries powered by knowledge rather than machinery, law, consulting, accounting, professional services, time is the raw material, the fuel, and the cost center. But unlike supply chains for cars or retail inventory, time has no dashboard. There is no clean system for tracing how it is spent, what it delivers, or where it’s lost. Alshak calls this the “time intelligence challenge.” 

“The world has spent decades optimizing dollars,” Alshak says. “We’ve ignored minutes. That’s the inversion we’re fixing.”

Now, investors are catching up to the vision. Laurel just closed a $100 million Series C round led by IVP, with participation from GV, 01 Advisors, DST Global, and prominent angels including OpenAI’s Kevin Weil, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, GitHub CTO Vladimir Fedorov, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, and Notable Capital’s Hans Tung. The round includes a $20 million secondary tender offer and values Laurel at $510 million more than double its previous mark.

It’s a big moment for a company that, just a few years ago, was considered an oddity in the valley. “People didn’t get it,” Alshak says, seated in a quiet conference room in Los Angeles. “They thought timekeeping was an administrative problem. But it’s a strategic one. It’s the invisible operating system of every firm.”

Laurel started out as Time by Ping, a product aimed at automating time capture for lawyers. It gained early attention by winning the inaugural Startup Alley competition at ABA Techshow in 2017, but progress was slow. “We were overcommitted to legal, and the tech just wasn’t ready yet,” says Alshak. “We had the vision, but the tech couldn’t deliver on it yet.”

That changed in 2022. Alshak got early access to OpenAI’s GPT-3 and recognized instantly what it meant. He paused everything, rebuilt the product, and relaunched under a new name: Laurel. When ChatGPT exploded a few months later, interest flooded in. Suddenly, what had seemed like a narrow utility became a strategic priority.

“I went from being the crazy person nobody called back to the one firms were calling saying, ‘Please help us,’” Alshak says. “That created our zero-to-$26 million contracted revenue moment over 24 months.”

Laurel now powers more than 100 top firms across law, accounting, and consulting including Ernst & Young, Grant Thornton, Frost Brown Todd, Saul Ewing, Freshfields, and Crowell & Moring. It operates across the U.S., U.K., E.U., Canada, and Australia.  Its AI-powered platform connects with tools like Microsoft Outlook, Zoom, and Slack to automatically capture how employees spend their time, using large language models (LLMs) to classify, contextualize, and quantify every task and interaction.

The results have been tangible. Firms using Laurel have recovered an average of 28 additional billable minutes per person per day and report 4–11% increases in overall profitability. One Big Four firms independently validated Laurel’s ROI methodology, which calculates both gross and net-new value derived from improved time intelligence. Today, Laurel processes over $5 billion in gross market value, of which more than $360 million is net-new value directly attributable to the platform.

“It’s better than anything we’ve ever used, and more than a time tool—it’s a strategic asset,” says Tom Barry, Managing Partner at GHJ, a Laurel customer. “We’re seeing the long game on this. It’s showing us business insights we couldn’t access before.”

Ajay Vashee, the former CFO of Dropbox and now General Partner at IVP, led the round. “Every company we spoke with gave Laurel a 10 out of 10 CSAT score. That’s never happened,” Vashee says. “And for me, as someone who’s lived through the chaos of quarterly planning and resource allocation, this problem couldn’t be more real.”

Vashee and Alshak spent over 20 hours together in a week before striking a deal. What compelled him, Vashee says, was the scale of the blind spot Laurel was addressing. “Professional services firms account for trillions in global GDP, but they operate without basic visibility into their most critical resource time,” he says. “Laurel is building the foundational infrastructure to change that.”

For Alshak, the mission is both business and personal. Laurel was seeded just weeks before his mother passed away in 2018. Her death forced him to reevaluate everything, including what he was really building. “A minute with her at the end was worth a million minutes doing anything else,” he says. “That’s when I realized—I’m not building a timekeeping tool. I’m building a mirror. Something that helps people ask: Am I spending my time the way I want to?”

Even the company’s AI interface is named Mori, after the Latin phrase memento mori, remember you must die. It’s a reminder, Alshak says, that time is both finite and deeply personal.

But the philosophical underpinnings don’t make Laurel’s ambition any less commercial. With professional services expected to spend over $1 trillion on AI in the next five years, the company is positioning itself as the layer that connects those investments to outcomes. “Right now, most companies are putting the cart before the horse,” Alshak says. “They’re buying AI tools but can’t prove their impact. We give them the data to do that.”

The company’s long game is to make work measurable, optimizable, and automatable—starting with time, but not ending there. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” says Alshak. “And in the world of AI, you can’t automate what you don’t understand.”

“The average knowledge worker works nine hours a day,” Alshak says. “But only adds leverage for three. That’s three hours that should be handled by agents and three more that no one should be doing at all. That’s six hours of human capital waste per person, per day. Multiply that by every knowledge worker on Earth, and you’re staring at the biggest opportunity in modern enterprise.”

Time, after all, may be finite. But with the right intelligence, perhaps it doesn’t have to be wasted.