AI-native time keeping startup Laurel Inc. said today it has raised $100 million in a Series C funding round to try and transform the productivity of legal, consulting and accounting firms, whose biggest resource is human capital.

Today’s round was led by IVP and backed by a long list of participating investors, including Google LLC’s GV, 01.a, DST Global, ACME, Anhos, AIX Ventures and Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, plus an impressive roster of angels, including OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil, GitLab Inc. Chief Technology Officer Vladimir Fedorov and Dropbox Inc. co-founder Arash Ferdowsi.

The startup is using artificial intelligence to try and fix one of the most challenging problems for companies that rely on human expertise – namely, the lack of visibility into how they spend their time at work. It does this by providing real-time insights into time allocation, so employers can optimize their workforce and make better decisions about how they work.

Laurel’s AI Time platform employs AI algorithms to analyze, categorize and describe how professionals spend their time at work. It does this by integrating with every bit of software they use, such as Microsoft Office applications, email, PDF readers, web browsers and messenger tools. Once it’s hooked up, it can then create a comprehensive overview of how each professional spends their time.

Laurel founder and Chief Executive Ryan Alshak told LawSites in a February interview that there’s an urgent need for legal, consulting and accounting firms to understand what their workers are doing in order to improve their efficiency. He points out that in the manufacturing industry, most successful companies will know exactly how much it costs to manufacture a car, down to the cent, while retail businesses can track their inventories with the utmost precision.

That’s because they have full oversight over their most critical resources. But professional services firms can’t say the same about their most precious resource, which is human capital. They lack visibility into both the outcomes of their work, and how long it takes to produce those outcomes.

According to Alshak, the average lawyer conducts around 250 distinct activities in a typical workday. So what Laurel does is it looks for any similarities across these activities, in an effort to group related tasks together and improve efficiency.

For instance, if a lawyer is working on a summary judgment motion, Laurel will group together related activities, such as reviewing PDF templates, Word documents and emails about that motion. This helps companies to connect time data with business outcomes, enabling them to allocate resources more efficiently and where to apply AI agents to automate aspects of their work.

Alshak describes Laurel’s platform as a “time intelligence layer,” which enables professional services firms to measure and take action on how people spend their time. Boosting productivity is the goal, and with knowledge industries expected to spend over $1 trillion on AI automation in the next five years, Laurel intends to show them where to direct these investments.

“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,” said Alshak. “We’re not just automating time. We’re creating the time intelligence layer that will transform how all knowledge industries operate.”

The startup has seen rapid adoption among professional services firms, chalking up clients including Ernst & Young Global Ltd., Freshfields LLP, Grant Thornton Advisors LLC and Crowell & Moring LLP. It helps these companies to analyze their time data and claims to recover an average of 28 billable minutes per day, per professional, boosting their profit margins by between 4% and 11%, while reducing the time they spend on manual data entry by around 80%.

Ernst & Young Partner and Tax Transformation specialist Matt Newnes said Laurel has shown itself to be one of the company’s most impactful AI investments.

“What used to be a manual process of time-keeping and entry is now significantly technology enabled,” he said. “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.”

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Laurel is a great example of how AI is being applied in the enterprise to boost worker efficiency, helping them to utilize their precious time for higher-impact work, without being bogged down by the mundane stuff. He believes employees will appreciate it just as much as employers do.

“Show me an employee who likes to fill out his or her time card, or someone who likes to review them,” the analyst said. “Laurel, with its time intelligence layer, is bringing a valuable innovation to the industries where time keeping matters most of all, in the professional services business. Raising $100 million demonstrates it has good momentum and offers big value, and it will be interesting to see what it does with the money and where it goes next.”

The impact of Laurel’s time intelligence layer has helped it to grow its own business tremendously. In the last 12 months, its annual recurring revenue has increased more than 300%, while usage of its platform has risen by more than 500% in the same time frame.

IVP General Partner Ajay Vashee said his prior experience as a chief financial officer means he’s very familiar with the “efficiency gap” that Laurel is trying to address.

“Professional services represent trillions in global economic activity, yet these firms operate without basic visibility into their core resource, which is time,” the investor said. “By solving the time intelligence challenge, Laurel creates a platform for broader AI transformation.”

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