Lawyer who never coded built GC AI after early GPT access

Cecilia Ziniti was general counsel at Replit when an executive told her she seemed distracted. "You're a great GC and good at business development … but it seems like maybe your head's not in it because you're so into this AI thing," she recalled him saying. She agreed with him.

In late 2021 and early 2022 Replit was working with OpenAI on coding products, which gave Ziniti access to a version of GPT before ChatGPT was released publicly.

She had never learned to code, never founded a company and never held a product role. She had worked as a lawyer for roughly two decades at Amazon, Cruise, Anki and Replit, having started as a paralegal at Yahoo and spent time at law firm Morrison & Foerster.

In 2013 she became the first full-time lawyer assigned to Amazon's Alexa. Autonomous vehicles at Cruise and robotics at Anki followed.

The product idea came out of teaching. Ziniti ran classes on using ChatGPT for legal work, and the failures in those sessions became her specification.

In one class she asked the model about the legal considerations of entering the Brazilian market. The answer covered the issues, but opened with a line about going to Rio and grabbing a surfboard.

The gap between an answer and something a lawyer could hand to a colleague became the requirements list: accurate citations, a pointer to where in a document the support came from, and the right register.

Her technical cofounder came from the same building. Bardia Pourvakil was an engineer she had worked with at Replit who had used earlier generations of GPT. Ziniti says he had been admitted to Stanford Law School and picked engineering instead, partly because he expected AI to automate some legal work.

"I would teach these classes in the morning and tell my co-founder in the afternoon," she told Crunchbase News, describing how the classroom fed the roadmap.

Because most of her career had been inside companies rather than at firms, she pointed GC AI at in-house legal departments. She left Replit on 1 November 2023 and incorporated the company in San Mateo, California, about a week later.

The first product was an AI assistant for corporate legal teams. Contract analysis came next, then a system for handling requests sent to legal departments. Revenue comes from per-seat subscriptions, a contract-analysis tool priced by document volume, and the request-handling platform.

On Ziniti's account the company serves roughly 2,100 companies, up from about 900 a year earlier, with customers including Lockheed Martin, Time, Eventbrite, Vercel and Gusto. She says growth has run at 400% year on year and that nearly 30% of seats are used outside legal, by HR and finance staff.

Trust is the sales obstacle, she says, and about a third of the company's 125 employees are lawyers. GC AI pursued SOC 2 compliance early, built data-isolation protections and says it does not train its models on customers' confidential information.

Fundraising leaned on a career's worth of contacts. One of the first commitments came from Amber Illig of The Council, a firm backing experienced operators turning founder, whom Ziniti had worked with at Cruise. "Once you get one commit, then it's relatively easy," she said.

The company has raised nearly $72m across three rounds, most recently a $60m Series B co-led by Scale Venture Partners and Northzone at a $555m valuation. Ziniti says about 45 general counsels have invested through a special-purpose vehicle.

The transferable part is not the AI. It is that she sold to the job she had held, to buyers who recognised her, and that she found the engineer to build it among people she had already worked with.