Partnering with Sandstone: An AI-Native Platform for In-House Legal Teams

• In-house legal runs on spreadsheets and manual toil — pure text-in, text-out.
• Sandstone: AI-native workflow engine targeting the in-house legal layer.
  • Not law firms — the understaffed, tooling-starved in-house teams.
• Sequoia led pre-seed then seed; both rounds on execution speed alone.
  • MVP shipped in weeks, customer feedback loop immediate.
• Balkansky nearly founded this himself in 2019 post-Google, post-VMware.
  • VMware needed 10 people to manually extract 62 contract terms.
  • Shared his 2019 PRD with Fleisher before investing.
• Founders: Nick Fleisher (McKinsey, engagement manager in 18 months) + Jarryd Strydom (attorney-builder).
• Sequoia’s legal tech thesis: Harvey (AI lawyer), Crosby (AI firm), Ironclad (CLM) — Sandstone fills the in-house gap.

Bogomil Balkansky (Sequoia Capital) · 2026-01-13 · Read on sequoiacap.com