Two Penn alumni recently raised $10 million in funding for their artificial intelligence startup, Sandstone.
Founders 2022 Wharton graduate Nick Fleisher and 2023 College graduate Liam Germain — who bonded over their joint interest in start-up ventures as first-year roommates at Penn — announced the funding earlier this month. Their Brooklyn-based startup was built alongside co-founder Jarryd Strydom in 2025 to help streamline the high-volume, operational aspects of in-house legal work.
The new funding round, orchestrated by Sequoia Capital, will help Sandstone market and scale its product, grow its engineering team, and meet increased demand from companies looking to replace manual processes with AI-driven workflows.
In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian, Fleisher and Germain explained that Sequoia was a natural fit for seed funding because of the venture capital firm’s prior experience with legal and enterprise AI.
“Sequoia has been a great partner,” Fleisher told the DP. “They’re strong on talent, strong on product, and strong on go-to-market. And Bogomil, the partner we work with, shares our thinking around simple, beautiful, intuitive products that also have very high functionality.”
Fleisher and Germain first met through a Penn Class of 2022 Facebook group. After noticing they shared several common interests, including fishing, the two decided to become first-year roommates together at Hill College House.
Within weeks, they made what Fleisher jokingly called a “handshake deal” to eventually drop out of the University and build a startup together. While both graduated from Penn, they spent much of their time at the University building ventures in their shared dorm room.
“Penn wasn’t historically super pro-startup,” Fleisher said, adding that there was “definitely a shift in our class year where a lot more people were building things.”
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Both co-founders said their time at Penn directly influenced how they built Sandstone. Fleisher cited an entrepreneurship course taught by Wharton professor Ethan Mollick as particularly formative.
“We would visit different successful tech and startup businesses in New York that are Penn-alumni-run, and learn about them,” Fleisher said.
Germain, who studied economics, echoed Fleisher’s sentiment on how Penn’s network shaped the company.
“Even today, some of the people we work with are friends-of-friends from Penn,” Germain said.
Before founding Sandstone, Fleisher led the legal tech practice at McKinsey and Company, where his work exposed him to challenges facing in-house legal teams.
“Legal teams don’t have a platform to manage their work, so the initial idea was building a very simple board that tracks different requests from email, Slack, and Teams in a single place,” Fleisher told the DP. “Once we built that, it was compelling to add in different business systems like Salesforce and Workday.”
The third co-founder experienced those difficulties firsthand when working as an in-house lawyer.
“We try to find folks like Jarryd while recruiting because not only understanding the problem, but also how hard it is to build the solution, just makes you super effective,” said Fleisher.
“Jarryd taught himself to code while being a full-time lawyer, and is also just a brilliant designer,” Germain added. “A lot of the original core designs all came from Jarryd’s mind.”
Fleisher emphasized that their tool is designed to incorporate, not replace, human oversight.
He explained that the Sandstone AI system leverages “the same legal playbook your team already uses” to review contracts, rather than a “general AI tool.”
“The biggest risk in legal AI isn’t necessarily the tools themselves, it’s how much automation people allow,” Fleisher said.
Sandstone’s system also characterizes requests by risk-level when they arrive rather than after review, helping legal teams track improvements in consistency and compliance.
The company competes with traditional contract-management tools and AI redlining plugins, but the founders argue that neither category offers the context or simplicity that legal teams need. Unlike other tools, Sandstone integrates context from across a company’s systems so lawyers can see deal history, prior contracts, and customer information alongside each new request.
“Most traditional contract-management tools can take months to implement,” Fleisher said. “Ours can be implemented in a week, and I think it’s largely due to the AI.”
When asked about the future of their company, Fleisher described his desire for Sandstone to become a product that corporate legal teams use daily.
“Our goal is that if you’re a lawyer at a company, the first thing you open in the morning is Sandstone — a place where you check what you’re working on, and what your AI agents are working on for you,” Fleisher explained.
Fleisher also emphasized that Sandstone was the culmination of a long journey in start-up creation.
“This is not our first attempt,” Fleisher said. “We’ve built dozens of things. It’s never too early to build, and it’s never too late.”
Germain added that Penn students shouldn’t feel pressured to plan out their next decade.
“You’re never too boxed in,” Germain said. “Most of what I do now, I didn’t study in college. It’s definitely about the relationships, and the most you can make out of them.”
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Staff reporter Advita Mundhra covers campus entrepreneurship and can be reached at mundhra@thedp.com. At Penn, she studies architecture and economics.
