Kourosh
Zamani

Nine months in, no outside capital, working on an idea that every law firm partner had probably dismissed as "software for a problem we've always had." That's where Kourosh Zamani and his co-founder Ryan Alshak were in late 2016, building what would become Laurel. They met as undergraduates at UC Berkeley - fraternity brothers first, business partners later. The origin story is not romantic. It's a specific observation: professionals in legal, accounting, and consulting spend a meaningful chunk of their day reconstructing what they did with their time. Not doing the work. Documenting it.

The company started as Ping Inc., then became "Time by Ping." The Twitter handle was @timebyping. The product was an automated time entry platform - useful, narrow, clearly vertical. For nine months, Kourosh was COO while Ryan was CEO, and together they bootstrapped far enough to earn a seat at UC Berkeley's SkyDeck accelerator, backed by the Haas School of Business, the College of Engineering, and the broader university ecosystem. That admission brought a seed round from Ulu Ventures and Initialized Capital. The machine started.

Before Laurel, Kourosh's career followed two tracks simultaneously - the kind of parallel-building that suggests someone who gets restless with a single lane. At Bailard Inc., the investment management firm in the Bay Area, he worked as VP of Business Development from 2012 to 2016. In parallel, he ran the Young Professionals of San Francisco (YPOSF), a non-profit networking organization he founded in 2010, which grew to more than 8,000 members and 150+ events. YPOSF launched a Dream Big Scholarship in partnership with San Francisco State University. He ran both for six years. That dual track - finance rigor plus community-building instinct - shows up clearly in how Laurel operates today: enterprise-grade product with a mission framing about giving professionals their time back.

The February 2023 rebrand from Time by Ping to Laurel was a tell. The company was no longer a legal-only timekeeping product. It was positioning itself as an AI-native platform for the entire professional services industry - legal, accounting, and consulting. New name, new scale, new ambition. Kourosh simultaneously shifted from COO to Head of Sales, a transition that signals something specific about a company: when a co-founder moves into sales, it means the product has product-market fit and now the question is distribution.

Laurel's platform does something that sounds deceptively simple: it watches your digital work across email, documents, web browsers, video conferencing, and applications, then generates structured, compliant time entries and billing narratives automatically. The result, according to Laurel's published customer data, is 28 additional billable minutes per professional per day, an 80% reduction in manual time-entry effort, and profit improvements of 4-11% for customer firms. The platform now processes more than $5 billion in gross market value and has generated over $360 million in net-new value attributable directly to Laurel.

By June 2025, Laurel raised a $100 million Series C led by IVP, with GV (Google Ventures) and 01A joining the round. The angel roster read like a who's-who of enterprise tech infrastructure: Kevin Weil, the Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; Alexis Ohanian, Reddit's co-founder; Vladimir Fedorov, CTO of GitHub; Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder of Dropbox; and Hans Tung. The strategic signal was obvious: this is no longer a legal tech niche play. Returning investors ACME Capital, Anthos Capital, Gokul Rajaram, Marc Benioff's TIME Ventures, and AIX Ventures also participated. Two months later, Workday Ventures made a strategic investment and Laurel became a Workday Innovation Partner - a relationship that opens enterprise distribution channels that take most software companies a decade to earn.

In April 2026, Kourosh was appointed to the Board of Directors at Riverview Bancorp, a public company in the Pacific Northwest. It's an interesting move for a technology founder - it puts him in a seat where AI expertise meets traditional financial services governance. His current title at Laurel is Strategic Partnerships Lead, a role that fits a company at the post-product-market-fit, pre-scale-dominance stage: building the ecosystem relationships that make switching costs real.

The company has 200+ employees as of 2026, up from 111 in late 2024. ARR grew 300% over a 12-month period at double-digit scale. Platform usage increased 500%. Those are not the numbers of a company still looking for its market. They're the numbers of a company that found it and is now running hard enough that the main constraint is execution speed.

What Kourosh Zamani built isn't a productivity tool. It's the infrastructure layer underneath billable-hour economics - one of the oldest business models in professional services. Law firms, accounting firms, consultancies: they all charge by the hour. They have for a century. And for a century, the person doing the work has also had to spend a non-trivial portion of that work documenting the work. Laurel's bet is that AI can collapse that loop entirely. The billable work stays. The administrative overhead disappears.

Nine years in, the bet looks right.