Inhouse Raises $5M Seed to Bring End-to-End AI Legal Workflows to SMBs

Somewhere between a handshake and a lawsuit is where most small businesses live. One contract clause off, one compliance form late, one “I thought that was standard” away from lighting money on fire. Legal has always been necessary, expensive, and just opaque enough to keep founders awake at 2:17 a.m. Inhouse looked at that tension and said, what if legal felt less like calling a fire department and more like having one built into the walls.

Inhouse has secured $5M in seed funding to make that vision real. The round was led by Run Ventures and Royal Street Ventures, with participation from Switch and Brian Liu, cofounder and former CEO of LegalZoom, who also joins as an investor and strategic advisor. When capital this sharp leans in, it is not charity. It is conviction.

Credit where it is due. Congratulations to Ryan Wenger, Co-founder and CEO, and Aarshay Jain, Co-founder and CTO, for building something that speaks both lawyer and machine without butchering either language. Ryan Wenger is a 2nd time founder and corporate attorney who previously built and sold WhereTo, a travel platform used by over 4M employees, after 7 years practicing business litigation. Aarshay Jain is an AI engineer formerly at Spotify, where he built AI systems used by more than 500M people, and holds a Master’s in Data Science from Columbia University. That is not résumé glitter. That is pattern recognition meeting execution.

Launched in 2025 and headquartered in Santa Monica, Inhouse positions itself as the 1st AI platform able to perform end to end legal work for small and midsize businesses. Not just drafting a template and wishing you luck. The system is trained and supervised by expert lawyers, integrating feedback from over 8,000 AI enabled attorneys across all 50 states. It handles contract drafting, complex legal questions, and when things get human, it connects businesses to a nationwide network of licensed attorneys and an affiliated law firm. Baker Hostetler, Morgan and Morgan, and Imhoff and Associates are among the national firms in its orbit.

Small businesses spend roughly $50B a year on legal services. That is not a niche. That is gravity. Inhouse is going after that spend by automating contract lifecycle management, compliance workflows, and proactive risk management. The play is simple and ruthless. Reduce friction. Lower cost. Increase speed. Keep the owner in control.

The lesson for founders is not just raise capital. It is build where pain is constant and budgets are real. Ryan Wenger and Aarshay Jain did not chase hype. They went after a line item every operator understands. Legal that finally feels in house. And when legal moves from a cost center to a capability, you start to wonder what other “necessary evils” are just waiting for the right kind of intelligence to walk in the door.