A Startup General Counsel Knew What Corporate Lawyers Needed From AI. So She Built It.

Amazon — editor’s note: The following is the fifth profile in a series of articles about startup founders from non-technical backgrounds who have launched successful venture-backed companies. Read the previous interviews with MagicSchool AI founder Adeel Khan here, Trunk Tools founder Sarah Buchner here, Tabs founder Ali Hussain here, and Craft founder Ilya Levtov here.

When an executive at Replit suggested that Cecilia Ziniti seemed distracted by artificial intelligence, she was not an engineer working on the coding startup’s AI products. She was its general counsel. The executive told her ‘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,’” Ziniti recalled in an interview with Crunchbase News. “And it was true,” she said. By then, Ziniti had spent roughly two decades working as a lawyer at companies such as Amazon, Cruise and Anki. She had never learned to code. She had not ever founded a company. And she had not worked in the same sort of technical or product roles that many venture-backed software founders have. But her time at Replit gave her an early look at generative AI. That was enough to inspire her to leave the legal profession and build GC AI, a startup bringing AI technology to legal work. An early look at GPT Cecilia Ziniti, co-founder and CEO of GC AI. (Courtesy photo) In late 2021 and early 2022, Replit was working with OpenAI on AI-powered coding products, giving Ziniti access to an early version of GPT before ChatGPT was released publicly. She began considering what the technology could mean for lawyers. Ziniti later taught classes on using ChatGPT for legal work. During these sessions, she began to see the disconnect between applying a general-purpose chatbot to a profession that requires precision, sourcing and tone.