Sandstone, the US-based legaltech startup, announced on 9 June 2026 that it has closed a $30m Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, six months after a $10m seed led by Sequoia. 

The platform, called Legal Relationship Management, targets in-house legal teams at small and mid-sized businesses. One of the three co-founders, COO Jarryd Strydom, is SA-rooted.

Sandstone has grown revenue 40x in the past 90 days, with customers including Wayfair, Grindr, Mercury and ElevenLabs.

Strydom's path is the SA-rooted-operator pattern in miniature: in-house tech attorney, then legal ops transformations at McKinsey, then co-founding Sandstone with CEO Nick Fleisher and engineering lead Liam Germain. 

The team includes former Big Law lawyers, general counsel from public companies, GC-turned-engineers, heads of legal ops, and engineers from Google and Microsoft. The pitch is deliberately different from headline AI-legaltech names like Harvey and Legora, which target private practice. 

Sandstone goes after the in-house corporate legal function, which Strydom describes as a shared inbox where lawyers spend their day routing Slack messages, emails and Jira rather than actually doing law. Lightspeed partner Guru Chahal led the Series A on a thesis around highly specialised vertical AI.

Bolt EV's actual owners turned out to be ex-pat operators when we dug in. BVNK was three South Africans selling to Mastercard for R30bn. Pulling Power Media's Cape Town team now has the credit for Kickstarter's top four game campaigns of all time. Now an Afrikaans surname sits on a Lightspeed-led $30m Series A in San Francisco. 

SA-rooted operators are quietly showing up on the most competitive cap tables in global tech more often than the local discourse acknowledges. The question isn't whether SA talent can build at this level; that's settled. The question is what proportion of it gets recycled back into the local ecosystem.

You might also like our SA startup ecosystem deep dive, our list of VCs funding South African startups writing cheques for SA founders, and the Littlefish funding round closed for a local fintech this quarter.

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