While helping another founder build an app that collected information about class-action settlements, Zim Hang came to learn how challenging it can be for consumers to seek compensation from companies they believe wronged them.
He also discovered mass arbitration, a way to pursue individual claims when companies’ contracts prevent customers from joining class actions. At the same time, he also realized that relatively few law firms were set up to manage thousands of those claims at once.
That gap became the basis for Chariot Claims, which has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Silverton Partners to help consumers pursue claims over alleged privacy violations, hidden fees and subscriptions that are difficult to cancel. Indicator Ventures, Lightbank, Neon Fund, ZVC, Rosecliff Ventures, Alumni Ventures, FJ Labs, Graph Ventures and Vermilion Ventures also participated in the financing.
The New York-based startup works with law firms to identify potential cases, find affected consumers and gather information needed to pursue compensation. The round brings its total funding to $15.7 million, which includes a $3.6 million seed investment in April 2025 and an earlier pre-seed round.
Chariot’s latest round comes amid a surge in investment across legal tech. Funding to the legal tech space hit a record high last year, with $4.6 billion invested, per Crunchbase data. So far this year, legal tech startups have pulled in more than $3 billion, putting the sector on pace to match or exceed the 2025 total.
The Chariot process works like this: For each case, consumers complete an intake questionnaire that assesses preliminary eligibility in real time. Chariot’s team then reviews these pre-qualified claims through a multi-layered system of technology and human oversight before sending it to the partner law firm handling the case. Hang, the company’s CEO, told Crunchbase News that Chariot typically receives more than 200,000 claim submissions per month and that it has taken on roughly 80 cases since shifting to its current business model just over a year ago.
The company has about 15 employees and is currently breaking even, he said. It plans to spend the new funding primarily on hiring and product development, including AI tools to review cases and help determine whether consumers qualify to participate.
A gap in consumer legal services
Chariot is Hang’s third startup. His first company grew out of sleep research he conducted while studying psychology and neuroscience at Washington University. He turned that research into a smart-pillow business and later sold its intellectual property to a medical-device operator. He later worked in healthcare technology and fintech, founded a startup in the Web3 space, and then moved into legal technology.
Across those industries, he said, he encountered complicated systems in which the interests of businesses and their customers did not always align. His experience helping the class-action settlement startup brought those concerns into focus.
He described being “frustrated and mystified and horrified by how our justice system works.”
Chariot started about three years ago, adopting its current model after Hang saw an opportunity to help law firms handle mass arbitration. Firms accustomed to class actions could struggle with the work required to manage large numbers of individual claimants, he said.
“It’s just really inefficient for them to try to build workflows around 10,000 claimants or 100,000 claimants,” Hang said.
Chariot handles parts of that administrative work, while its partner firms handle the legal claims. The startup charges the firms flat service fees, and they work on a contingency basis. Hang emphasizes that since it’s not a law firm, Chariot itself doesn’t file claims.
It helps consumers pursue a variety of claims. Those claims include allegations that websites or apps tracked their information without consent, that companies added fees during checkout, or that businesses made subscriptions easy to start but difficult to cancel, for example.
Finding evidence and drawing objections
Chariot starts by looking for potential cases involving privacy violations, hidden fees and other consumer complaints. Its software scans public records, including federal court filings, and uses AI to analyze the allegations and prepare research for its partner law firms.
That research includes legal memos based on publicly filed complaints. Chariot is also developing tools to track changes in laws and court decisions that could affect whether a case can proceed. The work remains in the early stages, with the goal of automating more of the research that associates and paralegals would otherwise do, according to Hang.
Chariot reviews a few hundred potential cases each month, he said. It tests ads for about 30 potential cases to gauge whether it can find consumers who may have a claim, then selects roughly 10 to pursue more extensively with its partner law firms. Each case can involve many individual consumers, whom Chariot reaches through advertising and partnerships with consumer financial technology companies.
To determine whether they have a claim, consumers must provide information to help assess it. For example, in the case of a data breach, that could be a notice from the company saying their information was exposed. For a hidden-fee complaint, it could include what they purchased, when they bought it, and how much they paid.
Chariot is building AI tools to help review that supporting information and determine whether a consumer has a claim, according to Hang. The required evidence, and the difficulty of verifying it, varies by the type of alleged violation.
The startup plans to make that step easier by allowing users to connect their email accounts so its software can look for relevant documents, rather than asking consumers to fill out forms. Hang estimates that such improvements could help the company handle 10x to 100x its current claim volume.
Companies push back
Not everyone welcomes Chariot’s approach. Advertising for potential claimants has brought strong objections from some of the companies involved. In fact, Chariot has received cease-and-desist letters challenging, among other things, its use of company names and trademarks in ads, noted Hang.
But he asserts that identifying those businesses is necessary to reach people who used their products or services.
“As a part of our business, we need to mention the name of the company that has this alleged violation,” he said.
Chariot reviews the letters with legal counsel and complies with demands it considers valid, Hang said. He declined to name specific companies for this article.
His broader goal is to make alleged consumer abuses more costly for businesses. If more affected customers pursue compensation, he reasons, companies will have a stronger financial incentive to change those practices.
“We want to make unethical unprofitable,” he said.
Mike Dodd, general partner at Silverton, told Crunchbase News via email that his firm was attracted to Chariot’s vertical AI approach to working with law firms, which he called “exciting and defensible.”
“It’s a greenfield market with space to expand horizontally and eventually into a generalized consumer legal AI solution,” he wrote. The firm was also drawn to what Dodd described as “a business model that aligns capitalistic incentives with access to justice.”
“When a company breaks the law and breaks what it promises to its consumers, the consumer rarely seeks justice,” he added. “Chariot has built the technology to make individual consumer claims work at scale, and the team to operate it in a category where execution is genuinely hard.”
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Illustration: Dom Guzman