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Cecilia Ziniti

Co-Founder and CEO, GC AI

Cecilia Ziniti is the Founder & CEO of GC AI, built from her experience as a three-time General Counsel. Over two decades, she has led product and company growth at venture-backed startups, including software unicorn Replit.

Cecilia Ziniti, Co-Founder and CEO of GC AI
Four US patents from work on the Amazon Alexa team.
Named inventor in consumer AI before legal AI became a category.
Founding lawyer for Amazon Alexa (2013).
Developed the legal framework for ambient AI before it entered the mainstream.
Creator of the legal AI curriculum used by 8,000+ lawyers.
Designed and teaches the curriculum, including a live CLE-accredited course through Maven.
Amazon

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, and no other lawyer in the room who had done it before. She built the legal framework from scratch for a product that would eventually reach more than 100 million homes, learning firsthand what it takes to create legal structures for technologies that arrive before regulations do.

Born in Italy and raised in the American Midwest, Ziniti earned a BS in International Economics from Georgetown University and studied at the London School of Economics before receiving her JD from UC Berkeley Law in 2009. She began her legal career as an IP litigator at Morrison & Foerster, representing Apple, after an earlier stint as a paralegal at Yahoo during the company's competition with Google in the early 2000s.

Bardia Pourvakil and Cecilia Ziniti at the GC AI booth

From Startup Counsel to Founder of GC AI

After Amazon, Ziniti served as Director & Lead Counsel at Cruise, then General Counsel at hypergrowth startups Anki, BloomTech, and Replit. She led more than $300M in financings with firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Index Ventures, and JP Morgan, and earned four U.S. patents. Across every financing, contract, and legal workflow, she saw the same problem: in-house legal software wasn't built for legal teams.

At Replit in 2022, Ziniti gained early access to large language models before ChatGPT launched publicly. After using them in legal work, she became, in her words, "truly obsessed." One week after leaving Replit, she founded GC AI, the platform she wished she'd had as a General Counsel. Today, more than 2100+ legal teams, including Vercel, Arc'teryx, and Tipalti, rely on GC AI.

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

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Speaking and Featured Writing

Common questions

Who co-founded GC AI with Cecilia Ziniti?
Bardia Pourvakil, a colleague she met at Replit. The two founded GC AI together in 2023.
What was Cecilia Ziniti's role at Cruise?
At Cruise, she served as director and lead counsel, advising on autonomous vehicle technology. That's a different role from the three where she held the General Counsel title outright, at Replit, BloomTech, and Anki, which is the basis for calling her a "three-time General Counsel."
Does Cecilia Ziniti teach AI skills to lawyers?
Yes. Cecilia Ziniti and GC AI's Solutions Attorneys teach GC AI's own AI Prompting classes for in-house counsel, CLE-eligible sessions hosted directly on the GC AI site. The same AI Prompting for In-House Legal curriculum is also listed on Maven. More than 8,000 lawyers have completed GC AI's courses, as of August 2026.
What is TechGC, and what is Cecilia Ziniti's role in it?
TechGC is a peer network for in-house counsel at technology companies. Cecilia Ziniti has been a founding member since 2017, predating GC AI by six years.
Why did Cecilia Ziniti build GC AI for in-house legal teams instead of law firms?
She's said in-house lawyers collaborate most with the business, not with other lawyers, so a tool built around how law firms bill and staff work ends up solving the wrong problem: "I don't want the product designed for lawyers who sell their legal services. I want it designed for helping the company achieve its goals."
Does Cecilia Ziniti host a podcast?
Yes. She hosts CZ and Friends, where she talks with legal and business leaders about running legal teams through a period of rapid technological change.
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