Legal demand keeps climbing inside companies, but the teams that handle it are not growing with it: only 32% of legal departments expect to add attorney headcount this year, according to CLOC’s 2026 State of the Industry Report. Most of those teams still run contracts through legacy contract lifecycle management (CLM) software that stores agreements but cannot analyze or act on them, so the review, negotiation, and follow-through land on the same overstretched lawyers. Chamelio is an AI-native platform for in-house legal teams that manages and performs the full contract lifecycle, from intake and drafting to negotiation, approvals, and obligations. Its AI agents draft from a company’s own contracts and playbooks, negotiate terms, route approvals, and monitor renewals, then escalate only the cases that need a lawyer’s judgment. The New York company, founded in 2024, pairs the software with legal engineers who migrate customers off legacy systems and put AI into production, and its ARR has grown 4x in a matter of months across 100+ customers, including Wiz, monday.com, Socure, and AppsFlyer. That traction points to a shift in what legal leaders ask of AI, from help reviewing a contract to deciding which parts of the department to delegate, as Deloitte predicts AI agents will make up 30% of a legal team within three years.
AlleyWatch sat down with Chamelio Cofounder and CEO Alex Zilberman to learn more about the business, its future plans, recent funding round that brings the company’s total funding to $39.5M, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We raised a $26M Series A led by Entrée Capital, with participation from our existing investors Work-Bench and Emerge Ventures, as well as Bright Pixel Capital.
Tell us about the product or service that Chamelio offers.
Chamelio is the AI-native operating platform for in-house legal teams. We manage the entire lifecycle of legal work, from intake and contract drafting to negotiation, approvals, contract intelligence, obligations and ongoing workflows. But the important distinction is that Chamelio is not just software that organizes legal work. Our AI agents can actually perform the work: review and negotiate contracts, make decisions based on the company’s legal knowledge, initiate workflows, monitor obligations and bring a lawyer in when human judgment is required.
What inspired the start of Chamelio?
We had seen the problem from both sides. Gil spent years as a General Counsel and experienced firsthand how legal teams were being asked to support more and more of the business without equivalent increases in headcount. Gal and I came from building and scaling technology companies, and we saw what AI was beginning to make possible. The realization was that most legal technology had been designed to manage the work around lawyers, rather than actually do meaningful parts of the legal work itself. We started Chamelio because we believed AI would fundamentally change that.
How is Chamelio different?
We did not take a traditional CLM and add AI to it. We built the platform AI-first. Traditional systems are primarily designed to store contracts, manage workflows and help lawyers find information. Chamelio is a system of action: it understands the company’s contracts, playbooks, policies and business context and can use that knowledge to take action. That means an agent can negotiate an agreement, monitor a renewal, prepare a document, route an approval or follow something through to completion, while escalating the situations that actually require a lawyer’s judgment.
What market does Chamelio target and how big is it?
We focus entirely on in-house legal departments, particularly at mid-market and enterprise companies. It is already a very large global software market spanning contract management, legal operations, legal AI and workflow automation. But we think AI makes the opportunity significantly larger. Historically, legal software sold tools that lawyers used to perform work. Increasingly, companies will also be buying AI that performs a portion of that work itself. That changes both the size of the opportunity and what a legal technology platform can become.
What’s your business model?
We are a B2B SaaS business. Customers typically enter into annual enterprise subscriptions based on the scale of their deployment and usage of the platform. An important part of our model is also Legal Engineering. We do not simply hand customers software. Our legal engineers help them migrate from legacy systems, structure their legal knowledge and workflows, and put AI into production inside the company.
How has the business changed since we spoke in February after the Seed round?
Quite dramatically. Since the Seed, our ARR has grown 4x, and we now work with more than 100 customers, including companies such as Wiz, monday.com, Socure and AppsFlyer. But the biggest change is probably the ambition of what customers are asking us to do. The conversation has moved beyond “Can AI help me review this contract?” to “Which parts of my legal department can I actually delegate to AI?” That shift is driving a lot of what we are building now.
What was the funding process like?
The process moved quickly because the company itself has been moving quickly. For us, the important question was not simply whether we could raise capital. It was finding partners who understood the size of the opportunity and were aligned with how aggressively we want to pursue it. We found that alignment with Entrée, and it was equally important to us that Work-Bench and Emerge, who already knew the company extremely well, continued to invest alongside them.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
The biggest challenge is always maintaining focus. Fundraising can consume an enormous amount of a founder’s attention, but at the same time we were onboarding customers, shipping product and scaling the company extremely quickly. You cannot allow fundraising to become the company’s job. The other challenge is being disciplined about who you take capital from. Money itself is largely a commodity. The people sitting around the table with you for the next several years are not.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
I think there were three things. First, the speed of customer adoption and growth: ARR grew 4x in a matter of months. Second, customers are not treating Chamelio as an experimental AI tool. They are increasingly putting it at the center of how their legal departments operate. And third, there is a much bigger category being created here. The future is not simply a better CLM or a faster contract-review tool. It is an operating system where lawyers, legal engineers and AI agents work together.
I think there were three things. First, the speed of customer adoption and growth: ARR grew 4x in a matter of months. Second, customers are not treating Chamelio as an experimental AI tool. They are increasingly putting it at the center of how their legal departments operate. And third, there is a much bigger category being created here. The future is not simply a better CLM or a faster contract-review tool. It is an operating system where lawyers, legal engineers and AI agents work together.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Our focus is very straightforward: product, customers and scale. We are investing heavily in our AI capabilities, expanding the product and Legal Engineering teams, and making it much faster for companies to migrate from legacy systems and deploy AI agents across their legal operations. At the same time, we are continuing to expand in the U.S. and move deeper into large enterprise deployments.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Capital is an accelerator. It is not a substitute for product-market fit. If I did not have fresh capital, I would obsess over the same things we obsessed over before raising it: customers, revenue, product and burn. The strongest position you can put a company in is one where raising money allows you to move faster, but not raising money does not determine whether you survive. Build something customers genuinely need and make every dollar count.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We are building toward Chamelio becoming the operating system for the in-house legal department. In the near term, that means more sophisticated agents, deeper integrations with the systems around legal, and the ability to delegate increasingly complex legal workflows to AI while keeping lawyers in control of the decisions that require judgment. Longer term, we think the composition of a legal department itself changes. It will not simply be lawyers using AI tools. It will be lawyers, legal engineers and AI agents working together as one team. That is the company we are building for.
What’s your favorite fall destination in and around the city?
Central Park. Fall is probably the best time of year in New York, and walking through the park when the leaves start changing is hard to beat.
