Most startups hire their first in-house lawyer somewhere between Series B and Series C. Before that, the founder is the General Counsel — except without the training, the playbooks, the panel of external lawyers on speed-dial, or the time.
They juggle a vendor MSA at 11 PM, an IRS notice at 8 AM, and an investor SAFE in between. They sign things they don't fully understand. They miss filings they didn't know existed. They Slack a friend's lawyer and wait three days for a reply.
GC AI gives a General Counsel superpowers.
FoundersCounsel makes the founder the General Counsel — with a system that quietly handles the 80% of legal work that doesn't need a senior lawyer, and routes the remaining 20% to one who is already briefed.
Why now
Frontier LLMs can now reliably summarise, redline and reason over US, UK and EU commercial documents. Two years ago they could not.
State and federal registries (Delaware, California, the IRS, USPTO, Companies House, HMRC, the EUIPO) expose enough public data to track entity, tax and IP status programmatically. Founders have been pre-trained by ChatGPT to trust an AI assistant with sensitive work — and pre-trained by GC AI's marketing that legal AI is real.
DocuSign, Stripe Atlas, Mercury, Carta and Gusto have made the last mile of incorporation, equity and execution almost fully digital. Outside-counsel rates have risen 30–50% in five years. The arbitrage between an AI doing first-pass work and a partner billing $400–$1,500 per hour is no longer subtle.
What we won't pretend
We are not a law firm. We do not give legal advice. State bars in the US and the SRA in the UK take that line seriously, and rightly so. What we are is a tool — and behind the tool is a vetted bench of humans for anything above a risk threshold.
Wrong advice on a tax notice is worse than no advice. So every claim cites its source. Every high-stakes interaction nudges you toward a human. Your data is encrypted, isolated per workspace, and never trains a model. The same playbook GC AI used for in-house counsel — applied to founders.
Software for the 80%. A vetted human bench for the 20%.