Time is relentless, dwindling, and utterly relative.
“The Greeks have two words for time,” Ryan Alshak, founder and CEO of Laurel, told me in a Los Angeles conference room in May. “There’s chronos, which is clock time, and kairos, which is your perception.”
Alshak has built his life around time—literally. His startup, Laurel, is designed to map how people spend theirs at work. By connecting with tools like Slack, Microsoft Outlook, and Zoom, Laurel quantifies knowledge work, using AI to help individuals and companies see where time goes—and which tasks and activities deliver the most return. The platform is gaining real traction in time-sensitive industries like law and accounting, with ambitions to redefine productivity even in fields where time isn’t billed by the hour.
“Our entire mission is to return time, and the statistic that underpins that: The average knowledge worker today works nine hours a day, but only adds leverage for three,” Alshak said.
The entrepreneur has a knack for imbuing his timekeeping and work analytics startup with axioms that sound like they might have come from the lips of ancient philosophers. “The finiteness of time is the universe’s ultimate feature, because it forces us to confront the reality that we don’t have infinite minutes,” Alshak says. “So, are we spending it wisely? That’s a highly personal decision. Laurel will never tell people how to spend their time, but we’re going to give you information that helps you make the best decision.”
The pitch seems to be working. Laurel has raised a $100 million Series C led by IVP, Fortune has exclusively learned. GV and 01 Advisors joined as new investors in the round, which values Laurel at $510 million—more than double its previously undisclosed valuation, according to the company. The raise also includes a $20 million tender offer, the startup’s first. Other new backers include DST Global, OpenAI’s Kevin Weil, Alexis Ohanian, GitHub CTO Vladimir Fedorov, and Notable Capital’s Hans Tung. Existing investors—Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, ACME, AIX Ventures, Anthos, and Gokul Rajaram—also participated.
Laurel, which has 59 employees, traces its roots back to 2016, when it launched under a different name: Time by Ping. But the company struggled to gain traction. Alshak says the problem was twofold—an overcommitment to the legal industry, and NLP technology that wasn’t yet up to the task. That changed in 2022, when Alshak gained early access to OpenAI’s GPT-3. He paused everything, overhauled the product, and reintroduced the company as Laurel. When ChatGPT launched, it came with a flood of interest he couldn’t have predicted. After years of nos, “I went from the crazy person to the person who firms were calling, saying ‘help us,’” said Alshak. “That created the zero-to-$26 million-contracted era we have over the last 24 months.”
For accounting giants like Ernst & Young and Grant Thornton, and national law firms like Saul Ewing and Frost Brown Todd, Laurel has become part of their AI strategy. The startup isn’t without competition—rivals include 38-year-old Aderant and 8VC-backed PointOne. But Laurel’s hard-won velocity started drawing attention from investors, including IVP general partner Ajay Vashee. The former CFO of Dropbox, he was compelled by the idea that you could truly start to solve the intractable question of time management, planning, and resource allocation.
“I lived the struggle firsthand,” said Vashee. “At most companies, it’s a total black box. You set goals, you’ll set your budget and plan for the year. And every quarter, you check in and it’s a scramble. What did this team do? Did we actually hit these goals? It’s a really inefficient and clunky process. But I had this vision with Ryan about how that can be completely redefined.”
Vashee and Alshak struck a deal in about a week, spending more than 20 hours together over several days. During diligence, Vashee encountered something he’d never seen before: “Laurel is the only company I’ve seen—and we’ve evaluated thousands since I joined the firm—that received a 10 out of 10 CSAT [customer satisfaction score] rating from every single customer I spoke with,” he said. “And we talked to dozens of customers across legal, accounting, and consulting.”
Tom Barry, managing partner at accounting firm GHJ, has been a Laurel customer since the start of the year—and as an accountant, he’s spent his career living in the six-minute increments the industry bills clients in. The same goes for his colleagues at GHJ, with whom he’s been in close conversation as the firm rolls out the platform.
“Like any other change management technology, there’s a bell curve,” said Barry. “Most people are in the middle of the bell curve. And, first of all, it’s better than any other user interface they had. So, that’s a quantum leap forward. Then there’s another element—you have any idea the amount of business insights we can get on this thing? We’re seeing the long game on all this right now: It’s not just a tool to help track time.”
Laurel’s long game goes beyond traditional timekeeping industries. The platform is starting to show companies the ROI of AI tools—quantifying productivity before and after adoption. “Most companies are putting the cart before the horse,” said Alshak. “None of the LLMs have figured out how to quantitatively prove the impact of AI in the enterprise. They’re relying on surveys or adoption as a proxy.”
“[Famed consultant and writer Peter] Drucker said you can only manage what you measure,” he added. “In the AI world, I think you can only automate what you measure.”
When I suggest this kind of tracking could veer into Orwellian territory, Alshak doesn’t flinch. Laurel, he said, prioritizes SOC and ISO compliance, field-level encryption, and data ownership—customers control their own data.
“Laurel is about aligning employee and employer,” he said. “Minimize input, maximize output. We want people to take agency over their time.”
Barry, the GHJ accountant, joked that time is both his friend and his enemy. That’s true for all of us—sooner or later, we’re reminded that time runs out. Alshak told me he thinks about death often. I believe him. Even Laurel’s LLM-powered chat interface is named Mori—a nod to the Latin phrase memento mori, or “remember you must die.”
For Alshak, the beginning of Laurel is inextricably tied to the end of his mother’s life, the end of their time together—she passed away from cancer in 2018, just weeks after the company closed its seed round.
“A minute with her at the end was worth a million minutes doing anything else,” said Alshak. “And I realized that I’m not building a timekeeping company. I’m building a company that allows people to understand: Am I spending my time in the way I want? I want to be the mirror back to the world, and I want to teach the world this lesson: We care so much about our dollars, but we’re so cavalier about our minutes. And that’s a fundamentally inverted framework.”
“I’m trying to live as if I’m gonna be here for 78 years, 4000 weeks,” he added. “I want every minute to matter.”
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
X:@agarfinks
Email:alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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Venture Deals
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-Maze, a London-based agentic AI-powered cloud security company, raised $25 million in Series A funding. Theory Ventures led the round and was joined by existing investors Cherry Ventures and Tapestry VC.
-Arketa, a New York City-based business platform for fitness and wellness studios, raised $15 million in Series A funding. Inspired Capital led the round and was joined by existing investors First Round, Y-Combinator, Amity, and Velvet Sea.
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Private Equity
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IPOs
- Caris Life Sciences, an Irving, Texas-based AI-powered oncology precision medicine platform provider, plans to raise $423 million in an offering of 23.5 million shares priced between $16 and $18 on the Nasdaq. David D. Halbert and Sixth Street back the company.
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Other
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Funds + Funds of Funds
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