In the legal department at DoorDash during its hypergrowth years, requests came in from every direction: sales, HR, compliance, all competing for attention. Kathy Zhu, then a commercial counsel at the company, found herself navigating an unscalable system of email threads and spreadsheets to keep track of it all. The pace was relentless, and the tools didn’t keep up.
That experience led Zhu to co-found Streamline AI, a legal operations platform aimed at fixing what she calls a “crippling” lack of infrastructure inside in-house legal teams. Alongside Google product alum Julian Wimbush, Zhu set out to build software that would automate intake, triage, and internal workflows, removing the bottlenecks she once faced.
The company recently raised an $8.6 million Series A, bringing its total funding to $14 million. Investors include Blumberg Capital, Tribeca Venture Partners, Acronym Venture Capital, and others. Streamline AI says it now supports over 500 in-house lawyers across customers such as Gusto, Acorns, and Bloom Energy.
Building Infrastructure for In-House Legal Teams
Zhu’s founding insight came while scaling the legal function at DoorDash during its rapid pandemic-era growth. As internal demand surged, the legal team’s intake process which is largely dependent on emails, spreadsheets, and informal requests became a bottleneck.
“I witnessed firsthand how manual intake and workflow processes can cripple even the most talented legal teams,” Zhu said in a recent press statement.
Streamline AI’s core product is an intake and matter management platform specifically built for in-house legal departments. Unlike general-purpose workflow software, the platform is tailored to legal-specific needs. It uses AI to extract and structure information from inbound requests, often sent as emails, and offers a conversational assistant that can respond to common questions, reducing the load on attorneys.
The company also offers features such as automated triage, cross-functional collaboration tools, document generation, and integrations with other legal software like Ironclad, a leader in contract lifecycle management.
Streamline AI’s broader ambition is to become what it calls a “mission control” system for legal departments, centralizing all internal legal workflows and providing metrics that legal leaders can use to justify headcount or identify process inefficiencies.
Targeting Mid-Market Legal Departments
The platform’s promise lies in shifting how legal teams operate internally: from reactive and opaque to structured and trackable. According to investor Pramod Gosavi, senior principal at Blumberg Capital and a board member at Streamline, what distinguishes the company is its “inside-out understanding of how legal teams operate.”
Customer testimonials provided by the company describe measurable gains. 8×8, a cloud communications firm, reported saving between 30 minutes and an hour per legal request after adopting Streamline AI. Overall, the company claims a 40–50% reduction in turnaround times and a 25% increase in response speed.
While those numbers are directionally promising, they have not been independently verified. The legal tech space is crowded with claims of efficiency, and actual performance often varies based on implementation, organizational culture, and IT buy-in.
What is clear is that Streamline is aiming to fill a distinct niche: giving lawyers infrastructure more akin to what sales or finance departments already use. In that sense, it is competing less with e-discovery or contract automation tools, and more with email threads, shared drives, and overburdened internal help desks.
With new funding in hand, the company plans to expand its go-to-market efforts, focusing on mid-market and enterprise legal teams that are growing fast but lack dedicated operations support. These teams often face rising internal demand without the scale, or budget, of Fortune 500 legal departments.
Streamline’s strategy appears to hinge on that middle band of customers: large enough to feel pain, small enough to be underserved. Its early traction with tech-forward companies like Acorns and Gusto may reflect a bias toward digital-native businesses, but the company is betting the need is widespread.
The next challenge will be proving that its platform can scale beyond early adopters and avoid the fate of previous legal workflow tools that struggled with user engagement or integration friction.