Cecilia Ziniti

In 2013, Cecilia Ziniti walked into Amazon as the founding lawyer on Alexa. There was no playbook for ambient AI, no settled law, no industry precedent, no other lawyer in the room who had done this before. She wrote the legal framework from scratch for a product that would reach 100 million homes. She learned what the job required: building legal frameworks for technologies that arrive before the rules do.

Born in Italy, raised in the American Midwest, she earned her JD from UC Berkeley Law in 2009, then spent two years as an IP litigator at Morrison and Foerster representing Apple. Her first tech job came earlier: a paralegal role at Yahoo in the early 2000s, when the company was still competing with Google.

After Amazon, she moved to Cruise as Director and Lead Counsel before becoming General Counsel at Anki, then Bloomtech, then Replit, each a hypergrowth startup running on a legal team of one. She led more than $300M in capital raises from Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Index, and JP Morgan. She holds 4 US patents. Every deal she ran and every tool she used was a signal: the software the market offered in-house lawyers was not good enough.

At Replit in 2022, she got early access to large language models before ChatGPT launched. She used them for legal work and became, in her words, "truly obsessed." She founded GC AI one week after leaving.

GC AI is the product she kept wishing existed. Her experience as an in-house lawyer is baked into every part of it: the system prompt, the tone, the workflows. Today, 1,500+ legal teams, including Vercel, Arc'teryx, and Tipalti, rely on it. She writes the "AI Counsel" column for ACC Docket, teaches at the UC Berkeley Applied AI Bootcamp, and invests in Replit, Instrumental AI, and Seek AI.

Education: BS, Georgetown · Sociology, London School of Economics · JD, UC Berkeley Law (Class of 2009)