A new legal tech fund, GCVC, has launched, backed by over fifty sitting general counsels from prominent private and public companies. Meanwhile, Wilson Sonsini is the first law firm to invest in the fund, which has just come out of stealth. It now joins the likes of The Legal Tech Fund, as specialised investors into this sector.
LPs include current and former general counsels of Salesforce, Circle, ElevenLabs, Whatnot, Rippling and many others. They have already invested in Sandstone.
It will also invest in compliance and regtech companies. The GPs are Erick Rabin, the General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer of Bilt, and Matthew Holbreich, a former venture capital attorney at Fenwick & West.
Rabin told AL: ‘We have also invested in Stilta [an agentic AI platform for patents], with several other deals under consideration. This is just an announcement of our launch, we have not yet closed the fund and we are not yet announcing the fund size.
‘We aim to invest in early-stage technology startups, generally Seed and Series A stage companies.’
Nick Fleisher, CEO and Co-Founder of Sandstone, commented: ‘GCVC has been an incredibly supportive investor [and] the perspective the LP base brings to bear is invaluable.’
The rationale is as follows: ‘GCVC was founded on two simple premises: AI is changing the practice of law, and legal leaders are the best positioned to understand and invest in that transformation. General counsels see which tools work because they use them.
That vantage point makes the fund’s diligence unusually well informed, and it makes GCVC particularly useful to founders after the investment, through introductions, customer feedback, and the perspective of a community that lives the problems these companies are built to solve.’
Is this a big deal?
Well, there are now several funds that target legal tech specifically. Naturally, we have TLTF, but also Relativity and also Thomson Reuters have funds that target legal tech as well.
What stands out here is the mass of GCs, which perhaps sends a message to the market that the clients want to back startups that support their needs, not just those of law firms.
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