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It's not just contract or e-discovery technologies that are seeing increased investment from Silicon Valley—processes like time and billing are getting attention as well.

Today, artificial intelligence-powered timekeeping software Ping announced it has raised $13.2 million in a Series A funding round. The round was led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from existing investors BoxGroup, First Round Capital, Initialized Capital and Ulu Ventures. The round brings Ping's total funding to $17.4 million, following its seed round in 2017.

Ping's software automates the timekeeping process by integrating with products that attorneys use for work on both desktop and mobile, and developing a timesheet for review. The AI component comes in as the software "learns" how attorneys work, and distinguishes between personal and professional activities. The company claims to help customers record an additional 32 billable minutes of legal work per attorney per day, and estimates the Ping software can integrate with the tech stack of about 1,000 firms.

For Ping CEO Ryan Alshak, becoming the top player for timekeeping in Big Law is the company's first goal. But beyond that, he told Legaltech News the company is focusing on "giving back to our clients data around how much something should cost preemptively. We like to say, if you're going to get rid of the billable hour, you first have to understand it, and that's what timekeeping is."

Ultimately, Alshak said he views the value proposition of Ping as all about data. "I think where our real value lies, because of our machine learning structure and data, is giving firms back that accurate and structured data on where time is being spent in order for them to build meaningful tools on top of the data to actually solve their problems."

With its new funding, the company said it plans to hire a number of new employees to its current 30 person team, primarily focused on quality, support and senior leadership of its engineering team. Recent hires include Somik Raha from investor Ulu Ventures who now leads Ping's Deployment efforts, and Michael Mizono, who was the first product designer at Nest and left Google to join Ping as head of design.

"The main goal for the Series A is to start scaling operations to start winning the market," Alshak said. "In order to do that, we need to make sure that our engineering team in particular is capable of supporting an enterprise software that can scale to 1,000 law firms."

Originally founded in 2016 in San Francisco, Ping was a member of the 2017 Lab program at London-based law firm Mishcon de Reya. Around that time, the company invested in securing patent protection> for its technology and entering new markets and firms. This year, the company was named to The National Law Journal's 2019 list of Top Emerging Legal Technologies.

In recent years, both the number of legal technology companies receiving funding and the overall amounts of funding have exploded, and the momentum does not seem to be slowing down. Funding has been secured in a number of different parts of the legal workflow this fall, ranging from contract management (Ironclad, $50 million) to litigation funding (Legalist, $100 million) to online legal marketplaces (Australia's Lawpath, $3 million).

But for Alshak, legal is just the first market of many he wants Ping to tackle. "If we do our job right, in five years, we won't be a legal tech company and we won't be a timekeeping company," he said. "The big winner in legal won't be a legal company; it will be an enterprise software company that has legal as one of its verticals. For us, timekeeping is the wedge to collect the data that we talked about earlier to actually really change industries."

Editor's Note: This article has been updated with comment from Ping CEO Ryan Alshak.