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Chamelio raised a $26 ,000 ,000, Series A for AI that doesn't just store a company's contracts, it drafts, reviews and negotiates them for in-house legal teams.
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Welcome to Startup Bios, I'm Brian McCullough.
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If you've ever worked at a company of any real size, you've probably sent a contract over to legal and then just sort of waited, and Maybe, waited some more. That's usually not because the lawyers are slacking, it's because there aren't enough of them, and it doesn't look like there are going to be a lot more of them anytime soon.
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The company trying to do something about that is called Chamelio.
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It's an Israeli startup that makes AI software for in-house legal departments, meaning the lawyers who work inside a company, as opposed to the ones at an outside law firm.
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This week they announced a $26 million Series A led by Entrée Capital.
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Their existing investors Work-Bench and Emerge Ventures came back in, and Bright Pixel Capital joined the round as well.
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And that's only about eight months after their seed round, which was a $10 million raise back in January the Work-Bench and Emerge led.
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CEO and co-founder Alex Zilberman wouldn't give Bloomberg Law an exact valuation. The only thing he'd say is that it's in the "hundreds of millions." of dollars. For a company that was only founded in 2024, that's a pretty good place to be. Zilberman held leadership roles at Pagaya, the AI Lending Company. And before that, he was a co-founder and the COO at AnyVision. If that name rings a bell, AnyVision was an Israeli facial recognition company that was considered a real pioneer in that space, and it made headlines over the years both for its technology and for a number of public controversies. It later rebranded as Oosto.
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One of Zilberman's co-founders at Chamelio, Gil Banyas, was actually the general counsel over at AnyVision, and he's got something like 15 years experience as a lawyer. So there's at least one person at the table who has personally been the in-house lawyer with the giant pile of contracts on his desk. And their third co-founder previously started an AI company that Sage ended up acquiring.
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Chamelio points to a couple of industry surveys.
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to explain themselves. The Association of Corporate Counsel ran one this year where budget and resource constraints came up as one of the key things holding legal departments back.
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And CLOC, which is a trade group for legal operations people, put out its 2026 State of the Industry report, where it found that only 32 % of legal departments expect to add attorney headcount this year.
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So the work keeps piling up, and for most of these teams, more lawyers probably aren't the solution.
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Camellio's bet is that the answer isn't any more lawyers anyway.
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The answer, they claim, is splitting up the work differently between the lawyers and the AI. There's a category of software called contract lifecycle management, or CLM, and for years it was one of the biggest categories in all of legal tech, well before the AI boom showed up.
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You've got companies like Ironclad and Icertis in there, among others.
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And what CLM software mostly does is store your contracts, keep track of where each one is in the approval process, and let you pull data out of them later. It's basically a really fancy filing cabinet with some workflow stuff bolted on. It organizes the legal work, but at the end of the day a human lawyer still has to go do the actual work.
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Chamelio wants the software to do a lot of that work instead.
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The platform can draft contracts using a company's own existing agreements as the starting point. It can review terms and negotiate them, it can route requests to the right people, it keeps track of obligations, like what you've promised to deliver and when, and it can run legal workflows that take multiple steps from start to finish.
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The customer gets to decide how much rope to give it.
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For routine, low-risk stuff, say a pretty standard agreement the team has signed a hundred times before, a company can let the system run on its own. And where you want oversight, you keep a lawyer in the loop.
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The idea is that the in-house lawyer spends less of the day marking up documents line by line, and more of it supervising, making the actual decisions, and doing the higher-level legal work that they went to law school for in the first place. Zilberman put it this way, quote, "The mistake in legal AI has been assuming the future simply looks like today's lawyer with faster contractual fact-checking."
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And he went on, quote, "AI in a legal setting shows dividends when it can make decisions intuitively, built on the corporate intelligence of each individual business. This is what Chamelio does.
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We ensure in-house legal departments deliver watertight contracts and outputs at AI speed, validated by the rigor of lawyers."
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he means, I think, is that every company negotiates differently.
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Every company has clauses, it'll never accept, and clauses, it'll give up on the second somebody pushes back.
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The pitch here is that Chamelio learns all of that from the company's own contracts, templates, policies, and negotiation history, and then it works the way that specific legal team would work.
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The company describes the product as a legal intelligence platform, and the core of it, they say, is taking all that messy unstructured legal material and turning it into something structured that the software can actually act on. A big chunk of the new money raised in this round is going into what Chamelio calls its proprietary legal action model.
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We've been talking a lot lately about AI moving from answering questions to actually doing things, and this is that same idea pointed at legal work. The model isn't just summarizing a contract for you, it's supposed to take the next step. They're also trying to take this beyond the legal department. Chamelio lets teams build their own agents that work with other parts of the company, like procurement, finance, product, HR, compliance, and sales. If you think about it, legal ends up sitting in the middle of a whole bunch of processes at most companies.
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A sales deal is waiting on redlines.
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Procurement is waiting to sign off on a new vendor.
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HR needs an offer letter reviewed.
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So if the legal agents can plug into those workflows directly, legal stops being the place where stuff goes to sit in a queue, at least in theory.
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The platform connects to things like Salesforce, Slack, NetSuite, and various procurement systems. Chamelio also pairs the software with what they call legal engineering. These are folks who combine legal knowledge with the technical skills to actually implement this stuff.
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They help customers migrate off their old legacy systems, get their contract repositories organized, and translate the way a legal team already works into AI workflows.
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And honestly that's probably most of the work.
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You can't just drop a model on top of 10 years of messy contracts and expect it to know what your company cares about.
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Somebody has to structure all of that and decide where the software is allowed to make its own call on its own and where it has to kick it up to a human. So this round is paying for three things, according to the company. More development on that legal action model, a bigger legal engineering and product team, and more investment in onboarding technology, basically trying to make that setup process faster.
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Zilberman also told Bloomberg Law the money is about expanding in the US and really ramping up hiring. Chamelio even predicts that legal engineers are going to become a bigger and bigger part of the in-house legal team going forward, sitting alongside the attorneys and the AI agents.
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On traction, Camellio says its recurring revenue has grown four times over since the seed round eight months ago.
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They don't say what the actual revenue number is, so we're only getting the growth rate. The customer count gets a little fuzzy too, depending on who you ask. The funding announcement says hundreds of customers.
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Zilberman told Bloomberg Law it's more than a hundred and that they're adding seven to eight new customers a month right now.
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And in an interview with Legal Technology the company said approximately 100. So call somewhere north of 100.
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The names they're pointing to include Wiz, monday.com, Socure, AppsFlyer, Fiverr, and on and on. A lot of Israeli tech companies in there, which makes sense as a starting point.
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The company told Legal Technology quote, "We secured our first big customer by cold LinkedIn outreach before we had a working product and any funding." So they got a customer to say yes to a product that didn't exist yet, which says something about how bad the pain must have been on the customer's side. Eran Bielski, a general partner at Entrée Capital, said what stood out to them, quote, "was not only the strength of the product, but how quickly Chamelio's founders execute, learn from customer feedback, and turn that feedback into a product with category-defining potential."
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And he laid out the ambition pretty plainly, quote, "Chamelio is building the AI-native operating system for in-house legal teams becoming the system of record, system of action, and system of intelligence for the modern legal function." Becoming the system of record tells you who Chamelio actually wants to take out.
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It's not trying to be a nice AI add-on that sits next to your CLM.
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It wants to be the CLM, and then do the work on top of it.
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That puts it right up against the incumbents like Ironclad and Icertis, who are, of course, bolting AI onto their own products as fast as they can. And then it's also up against a crop of AI-native startups going after the same thing. Bloomberg Law named Ivo and Sandstone as a couple of the venture-backed ones. And I'd keep an eye on the bigger general legal AI players like Harvey too, which I'd imagine are going to push further into in-house teams over time.
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as well. And replacing a system of record is really hard, because nobody wakes up excited to migrate years of contracts out of one system and into another. That's why I think the most interesting line item in this round is the onboarding technology. If Chamelio can make switching cheap and fast, the incumbents' biggest advantage, which is basically inertia, starts to go away. I have mixed feelings though about the legal engineering piece, It's the same forward-deployed approach we keep seeing with enterprise AI companies, and it's probably the only way to earn trust from lawyers, who are about the most careful buyers you can find.
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But it's part software and part services, at least right now, and that can get expensive as you scale. I'd also think about liability.
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The first time an autonomous agent agrees to a bad indemnification clause, somebody's going to ask who's responsible.
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Keeping a lawyer in the loop helps, but the whole value proposition is having that lawyer in the loop less often.
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Where customers actually set that dial is going to tell you a lot about whether this is really a new division of labor or just faster review.
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Still, that CLOC number is the tailwind here.
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If legal departments can't hire lawyers, the budget has to go somewhere, and it's probably going to go to software that claims to do the work.
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With revenue up four times in eight months, they claim, Chamelio looks like it's catching some of that right now.
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That's it for this episode. Like and subscribe.
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And if you'd like to get this in your ears every morning, check out the podcast, Startup Bios, wherever you get your podcasts.
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