Laurel: Returning Time to the World

Time is the most valuable — and most mismanaged — resource for lawyers, accountants and consultants. Tracking it is painful. Billing it is worse. And every lost minute chips away at morale and margin.

Because professional services teams rely on manual time tracking — often in six- to eight-minute increments — they can spend hours each week reconstructing their days. The result? Up to 10% of profit lost to unbilled work.

Ryan Alshak lived this firsthand. As a practicing lawyer, he saw how broken timekeeping was. With Laurel, he built the solution he wished he had.

Laurel is an AI Time platform that passively captures how professionals spend time across tools and projects. It takes the guesswork out of billing, delivers ROI from day one, and gives workers back their time and peace of mind.

What makes Laurel stand out isn’t just what it does — it’s how. The platform integrates deeply across the professional tech stack, using personalized AI models trained on real-world workflows to reconstruct time with narrative context and precision. Laurel doesn’t just track hours — it captures how work actually happens, then translates it into insight firms can trust and act on.

That’s why global accounting and law firms like EY Tax, Grant Thornton, Freshfields, and Crowell & Moring trust Laurel. A director at a major accounting firm said Laurel paid for itself in five days. One lawyer told us it gave them their Saturdays back. Customers love Laurel - it’s the only company we’ve evaluated in IVP’s recent history that received perfect 10/10 customer satisfaction scores in our diligence.

And that’s why we’re leading its Series C. This is just the start.

Laurel is creating a novel dataset of the true time required to deliver services — surfacing unreported tasks and revealing where work can be automated or optimized. As more firms move from hourly to fixed-fee billing, Laurel helps them price with confidence. Longer term, it gives leaders the clarity to align time, talent and technology with firmwide goals and profitability.

Part of the reason we’re so confident that Ryan and his team can seize new opportunities is that they already have.

Laurel launched in 2016 — years before ChatGPT and the rise of LLMs. When the technology caught up, Ryan and his team rebuilt the product from scratch to take full advantage of it. The result is a beautifully simple, deeply powerful tool that’s light years ahead of its first version.

That’s the kind of grit and resilience we look for in our founders, and it’s why we believe the time is right for Laurel.