Streamline AI, an artificial intelligence-powered workflow management platform for in-house legal teams, today announced it has raised $8.6 million in early-stage funding to help expand the company’s expansion to meet rising demand by legal teams struggling with manual processes.

Blumberg Capital led the Series A funding round, with participation from Tribeca Venture Partners, Acronym Venture Capital, Great Oaks Venture Capital, and Scribble Ventures. This fundraise brings the total raised by Streamline to about $14 million.

Founded in 2020, Streamline provides workflow tools built from the ground up, designed to handle the complexities of legal operations. It starts with an AI-powered intake that automatically extracts information from incoming emails, while a conversational AI capability handles routine questions that would otherwise take up an attorney’s time.

“Legal teams today are spending more time just getting their arms around the work — gathering context, getting approvals, figuring out if someone’s already working on something — than actually doing the work itself,” co-founder and Chief Executive Kathy Zhu told SiliconANGLE in an interview.

Zhu described Streamline’s goal as becoming “mission control” for in-house legal teams, a consolidated central location where the legal department could orchestrate and maintain its work to stay on top of everything coming in.

Once it delivers the documents to the appropriate team or team member, it also gathers context from the company’s knowledge. This helps eliminate the hassle of searching through contracts, documents, email and other communication to understand the context of an approval or document to track and triage legal matters.

“Our AI can actually read your email, figure out what’s missing, and go back to the business teams to ask for the details, without legal lifting a finger,” Zhu added.

According to Zhu, many legal teams are overburdened with work. Surveys conducted by Streamline revealed that 30% to 40% of lawyers feel that they’re only doing substantive legal work less than 50% of the time, with the rest of their time being taken up by communicating, managing documents or conducting discovery.

“Legal is literally drowning,” Zhu said. “You’ve got systemic issues with burnout and a huge disconnect because business teams don’t understand what’s happening with legal. We call this the ‘black box problem,.”

To combat this sense of “black box,” Streamline provides legal teams and businesses a full suite of analytics dashboards that allow them to see where requests come from, where they go and how work is being done. Zhu said this will help business leaders understand that often legal is not the blocker to business operations, and with a platform such as Streamline automating communication and workflows, those blocks can be swept away.

“Streamline has become a valued technology partner for 8×8, helping us achieve our vision of a more agile legal team,” said Ilan Hornstein, global vice president and deputy general counsel at voice over IP provider 8×8 Inc. “Streamline gives visibility and empowers our team with the clear insights needed to be highly responsive and build stronger trust with sales, finance and other internal partners.”

The company said it supports more than 500 in-house lawyers with its platform and credits itself with 25% faster response times. Using the built-in dashboards helps identify process bottlenecks, enabling teams to refine their existing workflows. It also offers AI-powered legal contract review capabilities, automated reminders, legal content generation and project management.

KnowledgeBot, its generative AI chatbot built on OpenAI’s GPT-4o, helps in-house legal teams manage frequently asked questions from business users in the company when they can be answered without needing the immediate attention of an attorney. The chatbot can directly integrate with Slack to respond to everyday questions based on company knowledge and policies.

“Ultimately, I think the industry is converging toward one consolidated platform that can do as much as possible so legal teams can maintain a single vendor relationship and roll out one tool, and that’s the future we’re building toward,” Zhu said.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer