We recently sat down with Founder and CEO Ryan Alshak at Laurel, a former litigator turned entrepreneur on a mission to reclaim time for knowledge workers through AI. Seeking to enhance efficiency and minimize errors among professional services, Laurel is an AI platform that specializes in capturing professionals’ digital work to provide enterprises with a clear view of how work is being done and where time is being spent. Most recently, they secured a $100M Series C led by IVP, with involvement from Google Ventures, ACME, and 01A, thereby allowing Laurel to scale its AI platform to tackle the “time intelligence challenge”: helping knowledge industries finally connect time to value.
Tanya Privé had the pleasure of sitting down with Ryan for a conversation about the origins of Laurel, the evolution and future of its AI platform, and how time itself may be the most undervalued asset in professional services today.
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TANYA PRIVÉ: We recently sat down for a conversation with Ryan Alshak, CEO and Founder of Laurel. Ryan, so glad to have you here. Let’s start at the beginning. What inspired you to launch Laurel, and what problem were you most obsessed with solving?
RYAN ALSHAK: Tanya, thanks for having me. Honestly, it came down to one thing, which was time. Over the years, I kept noticing how much time was being wasted in professional services. But the systems in place didn’t just track time badly—they completely misunderstood the way people worked. The workflows punished busy professionals. The data misrepresented their value. So I started Laurel to fix that. To capture digital work at its source, automate the things no one should be doing manually, and ultimately give time back to professionals, to firms, and to the people they serve.
TANYA: I know that time tracking isn’t a new problem, but Laurel takes a very different approach. How did you land on “time intelligence” as the wedge?
RYAN: You’re right, time tracking has been around forever. But that’s exactly the problem. For decades, professionals have been reconstructing their days manually. It’s error-prone, expensive, and honestly, rather soul-crushing. So, we asked a different question. Not “How do we make timesheets easier?” but “What if we could eliminate them altogether?” That’s what led us to Time Intelligence. Laurel doesn’t just track hours—we understand the work behind the time. We analyze work patterns and reconstruct a professional’s day with context and accuracy no human could match. And once you have that intelligence, you unlock something bigger. You move from timekeeping to understanding how work happens—and eventually, how it maps to business outcomes. We call that the Work Graph. And that’s a category shift.
TANYA: Talk to me about the journey to product-market fit. Were there any major pivots or surprising insights?
RYAN: Oh, definitely, plenty. We started out thinking that automation would be enough. If we made time entry effortless, people would adopt it. But we quickly learned that “correct” isn’t good enough in this space. The stakes are too high. One wrong entry and you lose trust, or worse, you don’t get paid. So we made a key shift. We added transparency and control. We let professionals see how entries were constructed, edit them, and let teams layer in compliance and billing rules. That was a huge unlock. But the big “aha” moment came when we started showing firms what they were missing—the underbilling, the leakage, the work that went untracked. And when that surfaced, it hit their P&L. That’s when adoption exploded.
TANYA: It’s fascinating how a shift in trust and transparency, not just automation, was the real unlock. And speaking of early lessons, what was the biggest technical or strategic challenge you faced early on?
RYAN: Reconstructing a professional’s day from fragmented digital signals without manual input is extremely difficult. We had to build our own work ontology, ingest billions of data points, and train models to understand the nuances of knowledge work. But the harder challenge was trust. Our users bill in six-minute increments. They can’t afford guesswork. So we had to be audit-proof, enterprise-grade, and compliant with every billing rule out there. That’s why we invested early in field-level encryption and regional data processing—things most companies wait to do. And we backed it all with a white-glove implementation and compliance team.
TANYA: Congratulations on the $100 million Series C! You really brought together some incredible investors, such as IVP, Google Ventures, 01A, ACME, and folks from OpenAI, Salesforce, and GitHub. What do they bring to the table beyond capital?
RYAN: Thank you! For the investors, every investor in this round was handpicked. IVP has backed legendary SaaS companies like Slack, GitHub, and Dropbox—they know how to scale from product-market fit to category dominance. And GV? They’ve built and scaled AI infrastructure at Google. They deeply understand enterprise go-to-market. And 01A brings the operational playbook from building Twitter and investing in AI-native companies like OpenAI and Anduril. But the real value has been in the strategic conversations. They’re helping us answer the hard questions: How do we become the system of record for professional services? How do we make AI feel invisible—but indispensable? They’re not just backing Laurel today. They’re helping us build the Laurel we see ten years from now.
TANYA: Let’s talk about what’s coming. What’s next for Laurel, and how do you think your work will impact how knowledge work is valued?
RYAN: Right now, we’re focused on building out the world’s first AI-native Time platform. In the near term, that means expanding our Time Intelligence Layer—giving executives real-time analytics, automating pre-bill workflows, and making the platform more extensible. But more broadly, we’re expanding beyond law into accounting, consulting, and other verticals. We’re also developing vertical AI agents that can reason across time, work, and value, fundamentally changing how work is valued. When you understand True Time™, you can build an entirely new operating model—one where value is data-backed, burnout is visible, and resources are allocated intelligently. Laurel becomes the connective tissue between people, platforms, and productivity.
TANYA: Final thoughts before we wrap?
RYAN: Time is the most precious resource in professional services—but we’ve been treating it like a line item on a spreadsheet. At Laurel, we believe time isn’t just a metric. It’s the mirror of your business. And if we can help organizations see it that way—understand it, optimize it, and respect it—we’re not just saving time. We’re changing how work works.
TANYA: Ryan, thank you for such a thoughtful conversation. I’m excited to see what the future holds for Laurel!
RYAN: Thanks, Tanya. It’s been great talking with you.
