Allie Garfinkle
6 min read
Time is relentless, dwindling, and utterly relative.
“The Greeks have two words for time,” Ryan Alshak, founder and CEO of Laurel, told me in a Los Angeles conference room in May. “There’s chronos, which is clock time, and kairos, which is your perception.”
Alshak has built his life around time—literally. His startup, Laurel, is designed to map how people spend theirs at work. By connecting with tools like Slack, Microsoft Outlook, and Zoom, Laurel quantifies knowledge work, using AI to help individuals and companies see where time goes—and which tasks and activities deliver the most return. The platform is gaining real traction in time-sensitive industries like law and accounting, with ambitions to redefine productivity even in fields where time isn’t billed by the hour.
“Our entire mission is to return time, and the statistic that underpins that: The average knowledge worker today works nine hours a day, but only adds leverage for three,” Alshak said.
The entrepreneur has a knack for imbuing his timekeeping and work analytics startup with axioms that sound like they might have come from the lips of ancient philosophers. “The finiteness of time is the universe’s ultimate feature, because it forces us to confront the reality that we don’t have infinite minutes,” Alshak says. “So, are we spending it wisely? That’s a highly personal decision. Laurel will never tell people how to spend their time, but we’re going to give you information that helps you make the best decision.”
The pitch seems to be working. Laurel has raised a $100 million Series C led by IVP, Fortune has exclusively learned. GV and 01 Advisors joined as new investors in the round, which values Laurel at $510 million—more than double its previously undisclosed valuation, according to the company. The raise also includes a $20 million tender offer, the startup’s first. Other new backers include DST Global, OpenAI’s Kevin Weil, Alexis Ohanian, GitHub CTO Vladimir Fedorov, and Notable Capital’s Hans Tung. Existing investors—Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, ACME, AIX Ventures, Anthos, and Gokul Rajaram—also participated.
Laurel, which has 59 employees, traces its roots back to 2016, when it launched under a different name: Time by Ping. But the company struggled to gain traction. Alshak says the problem was twofold—an overcommitment to the legal industry, and NLP technology that wasn’t yet up to the task. That changed in 2022, when Alshak gained early access to OpenAI’s GPT-3. He paused everything, overhauled the product, and reintroduced the company as Laurel. When ChatGPT launched, it came with a flood of interest he couldn’t have predicted. After years of nos, “I went from the crazy person to the person who firms were calling, saying ‘help us,’” said Alshak. “That created the zero-to-$26 million-contracted era we have over the last 24 months.”
