# Caseflood.ai

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/caseflood-ai/ · added 2026-11-05 · updated 2026-11-06

**In short.** Caseflood.ai (AI intake software for plaintiff law firms: call guidance, texting and follow-up, United States): 114K intake calls a month (company figure), November 2026. Evidence grade E: no revenue figure was checked. Team: 3 founders in 2024 (CMU news, YC launch post); 6 named leaders and a 50-person intake team on the company page, November 2026. Launched September 2024; still running.

AI intake software for plaintiff law firms: call guidance, texting and follow-up · United States · AI-native · started small, grew after funding · still running · group: Legal and law firms

- Outcome: 114K intake calls a month (company figure), November 2026 (evidence grade of the headline number: E; no revenue figure)
- Launch: September 2024; months from launch to the outcome: 26
- Team: 3 founders in 2024 (CMU news, YC launch post); 6 named leaders and a 50-person intake team on the company page, November 2026
- Outside funding: Funded: Y Combinator (Winter 2025); the company page says the founder raised "millions"; amount not found in the sources read
- Main factor: Niche
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 1, capital needed 2
- Tags: AI-native, Small team, Funded, Running, B2B, Legal software

Links:

- Visit caseflood.ai: https://www.caseflood.ai/

**The product.** Software for the intake teams of high-volume plaintiff law firms, the staff who answer and call back people who may become clients. AI decides when to dial, writes and sends follow-up texts, prepares each call, gives the human rep live guidance and a script during the call, transcribes and translates, fills the intake form and updates the firm's CRM. The firm's own reps do the talking. Caseflood also sells an onboarding and coaching engagement with the software.

**Why it worked.** The founder had sold legal leads to law firms as a teenager and saw that firms paid for leads and then lost many of them because nobody called back fast or followed up for months. The first product in 2024 was an AI receptionist that answered the calls itself; by November 2026 the company had moved to helping human reps sign more cases.

Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; E = no revenue figure found, so the headline is a non-money fact and the other facts carry their own grades; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.

## Summary

Caseflood.ai sells legal intake software. Intake is the first contact between a law firm and a possible client: answering the call, asking the qualifying questions, and getting a retainer, the signed agreement that makes the person a client, signed. Its home page in November 2026 describes AI that dials, texts, prepares calls and gives reps real-time call guidance, suggested lines shown on screen while the rep is speaking, and claims that it handles 114,000 intake calls a month.

Ethan Hilton founded it in 2024 with Tolen Schreid and Ayushman Srivastava, according to Carnegie Mellon's business school, which wrote in December 2024 that Hilton was 18 and the third-youngest founder Y Combinator had ever accepted. The Winter 2025 launch post presented AI agents named Luna and Jess that answered calls and texted clients. In November 2026 the company page lists Hilton and Derek Armfield as co-founders, four other leaders, and a 50-person intake team.

No revenue figure was found. The launch post stated a US$3,000 setup fee, and the company page states that the founder raised "millions" without an amount. This is a grade E story: the business is real and live, and its money results are not known.

## Pricing

Caseflood prices: the only published price is the setup fee in the February 2025 launch post (grade C); the November 2026 site has no price list

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Setup fee, February 2025 | 3,000 one-time |  | launch post; waived with code YCW25 |
| Platform and engagement, November 2026 | no list price |  | free intake audit, then a call |

The February 2025 launch post offered to waive a US$3,000 setup fee with the code YCW25. The site read on 5 November 2026 has no pricing page: it offers a free intake audit and a booked call, and its FAQ describes a first week of audit and setup, then two months of tuning and a review in the third month.

## How much revenue does Caseflood.ai make? The numbers, graded

A Y Combinator legal-intake company that started as an AI receptionist in 2024 and in November 2026 sells AI tools for human intake reps, with no published revenue

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2024, by Ethan Hilton, Tolen Schreid and Ayushman Srivastava | C | Carnegie Mellon Tepper School news, 17 December 2024: "Founded earlier this year". The Y Combinator profile gives 2025 as the year founded. | [5, 4] |
| Launch | about September 2024 | C | The 17 December 2024 article says it "Officially launched only three months ago" and was already fielding calls for law firms across the country. | [5] |
| Founder's age | 18 in December 2024 | C | Tepper School news: "Ethan's age of 18 makes him the program's third youngest founder ever". He is an adult today. | [5] |
| Intake calls, November 2026 | more than 114,000 a month | C | Company home page, read 5 November 2026: "Caseflood handles 114,000 intake calls a month." Not checked by any other source. | [1] |
| Claimed customer results | 94% more signed cases and 48% lower acquisition cost on average | C | Home page, "Average results from the firms that run their intake on Caseflood". No method or sample size is given. | [1] |
| Team at the start | 3 co-founders | C | Tepper School news and the February 2025 launch post. The Y Combinator profile still shows a team size of 2. | [5, 3, 4] |
| Team, November 2026 | 6 named leaders; the CEO's profile mentions a 50-person intake team | C | Company page: co-founders Ethan Hilton (CEO) and Derek Armfield (CTO), a VP of Sales, a VP of Customer Success, a growth lead and a founding engineer. Schreid and Srivastava are not listed. | [2] |
| Funding | Y Combinator, Winter 2025; amount not found | C | The company page says the founder raised "millions"; the home page says "Backed by Y Combinator and 36 more". | [2, 1, 4] |
| Setup fee, February 2025 | US$3,000, waived with code YCW25 | C | Stated by the company in the Y Combinator launch post of 20 February 2025. | [3] |
| Location | Miami | C | Y Combinator company profile. | [4] |
| Time from launch to the November 2026 call figure | 26 months | calc | Calculated: September 2024 to November 2026. | [5, 1] |

How to read this table: a grade C value comes from the company's own pages, its Y Combinator pages or a university news article written from the founders' statements. A "calc" value was computed on this page. No value is grade A or B, and no revenue figure exists.

## When did Caseflood.ai launch, and how did it grow? Timeline

From an AI receptionist built by three students to software that coaches human intake teams, in about two years. Each entry carries its grade.

- **2024** (grade C [5]): Hilton, a first-year business student at Carnegie Mellon, founds Caseflood.ai with Schreid and Srivastava; they build a multilingual AI receptionist for law firms.
- **About September 2024** (grade C [5]): Official launch; by December it is fielding calls for law firms across the United States.
- **17 December 2024** (grade C [5]): Carnegie Mellon reports the acceptance into Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch.
- **20 February 2025** (grade C [3]): Y Combinator launch post: AI agents Luna (phone intake) and Jess (texts and follow-up), with a US$3,000 setup fee stated by the company.
- **November 2026** (grade C [1, 2]): The site describes an intake operating system for human reps, with 114,000 intake calls a month by the company's own figure, and a new leadership page.

## Why did Caseflood.ai work?

### One narrow buyer

It sells only to plaintiff law firms with large intake teams, such as personal-injury and workers' compensation firms. These firms already pay for advertising and leads, so the pitch is to sign more of the leads they bought, not to find new ones.

### From replacing staff to helping staff

The 2025 launch post promised AI agents that were "5X better and 10X cheaper" than human staff. The 2026 site says the opposite about the call itself: the CTO's view is that "sales should remain human", and AI handles dialing, texting, preparation and paperwork around the rep.

### Software plus a service

The FAQ calls the product "Both" software and an ongoing engagement: the company audits a firm's intake, configures the platform, and reviews results after three months. This makes each customer slower to win and harder to copy for one person.

## How it was built

These details come from the company's own pages and its Y Combinator launch post. They are grade C.

- The 2024 to 2025 product was a multilingual AI phone receptionist that qualified callers, booked consultations, took payments and sent texts during the call, plus an SMS agent for follow-up.
- The 2026 product gives reps a live call plan, transcription, translation and automatic form filling, and an assistant that reports what the AI did each week.
- It connects to the firm's lead sources, CRM and case management software; the connections are mapped during setup.
- The marketing site is a Next.js site and uses PostHog, the LinkedIn Insight Tag, the Meta Pixel and RB2B, by its own privacy notice.
- Which AI models it uses is not published.

Sources: [1, 3, 6]

## Who tried this before Caseflood.ai, and why did they fail?

Three companies in our database of failed startups sold sales calls or technology to the legal market and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.

The failed startups come from our database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade.

### VOIQ (2015 to 2018; funding US$5M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: Outsource your sales calls to trained agents without hiring an in-house team.
- Why it died: Its human-centred calling model could not compete with automated sales tools and large freelance platforms.
- Record: 

### Atrium (2017 to 2021; funding US$75M; cause: Product/Tech Failure)

- Promise: Automate legal work for startups so it is faster, cheaper and more predictable than large law firms.
- Why it died: Its automation could not handle real legal complexity, so it carried large-firm costs without their quality.
- Record: 

### ROSS Intelligence (2015 to 2018; funding US$13M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: AI legal research that finds the relevant case law faster than the established databases.
- Why it died: Lawyers stayed with the databases they already used.
- Record: 

## What changed

VOIQ sold human callers and lost to automation; ROSS sold AI to lawyers and lost to incumbents. Caseflood combines the two: it keeps human reps on the call and uses language models for the work around the call, and it sells to firms' intake teams rather than to lawyers doing research.

Speech recognition, translation and text generation that run during a live call became cheap enough after 2023 for a small team to build a call workspace like this. The open question is the one that ended Atrium: whether a mix of software and hands-on service can grow without the service costs growing as fast.

## Can one person copy Caseflood.ai now?

**Verdict: Hard for one person; the niche pattern is clear.**

The company relies on the founder's years of selling to law firms, a funded team and a service engagement for each customer. The pattern of finding an industry that pays for leads and then loses them in follow-up can be copied in smaller niches.

1. Find an industry that buys leads by the thousand and calls them back by hand.
2. Measure how many leads are reached and signed before and after the tool.
3. Automate the work around the call first: texts, dialing, notes and forms.
4. Keep a human on the conversation where the buyer wants one.

**What is still open.** Other industries with paid leads and phone sales, such as home services, insurance and solar, where a small team could serve one region or one trade.

## What could go wrong for Caseflood.ai?

- **What is not verified.** No revenue figure was found. The only traction figures are the company's own: 114,000 intake calls a month and average results of 94% more signed cases on the home page read 5 November 2026, and law firms "across the US" in the February 2025 launch post. No payment-processor profile, funding amount, filing or press report with figures was found. The founder's earlier legal-leads business is described as making "5-figure MRR" in the launch post and as "seven-figure" on the 2026 company page; neither was checked. A reader could look for a funding announcement or a customer interview with numbers.
- **Team history and age.** Caseflood was founded in 2024 by three people; Tepper School news gave Hilton's age as 18 in December 2024, so all current co-founders are adults. The 2026 company page lists a different co-founder pair (Hilton and Derek Armfield) and does not name the two other founders of 2024. It also says Hilton built a legal-leads business at 16, before Caseflood; that earlier business is history, not this product. The page mentions a 50-person intake team without saying whether those people work for Caseflood today.
- **AI messages and calls.** The 2025 launch post presented Luna, an AI intake specialist that answered callers; no downloaded page says whether callers were told they were speaking with an AI. The 2026 FAQ says clients talk to human reps, but AI writes and sends personalised texts in the firm's name, and an "optional personalized voicemail" is offered without a description of how it is made. The sources read do not address consent rules for calls and texts to leads.
- **Leads, visitor data and trust signals.** Caseflood does not sell leads or contact data in the pages read: it works on leads that firms already buy, and it drafts reports for their lead suppliers. Its own marketing site uses RB2B to match visitors to business contact data, with an opt-out and Global Privacy Control respected, by its privacy notice of 13 October 2026. The home page shows named testimonials from two firms and "Backed by Y Combinator and 36 more" without listing the 36.
- **Competition and model providers.** Aeva AI, already on this site, sells an AI phone receptionist to clinics, the kind of product Caseflood started with, and 10x sells AI calls and texts to dental practices. The CTO says the platform is built to "improve as AI models advance", but no page names the model or speech providers, so its dependence on them cannot be judged.

## Sources

1. Caseflood home page, read 5 November 2026 — https://www.caseflood.ai/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the product, the 114,000 calls a month, the claimed average results, the FAQ and the testimonials.
2. Caseflood company page, read 5 November 2026 — https://www.caseflood.ai/company (grade C). Read in full. Source for the leadership team, the founder's background and the funding statement.
3. Y Combinator launch post, 20 February 2025: Caseflood.ai: The AI Support Staff For Law Firms — https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/MrF-caseflood-ai-the-ai-support-staff-for-law-firms (grade C). Read in full. Source for the founding team, the AI agents Luna and Jess and the US$3,000 setup fee.
4. Y Combinator company profile: Caseflood.ai — https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/caseflood-ai (grade C). Read the profile fields in the page data: batch Winter 2025, year founded 2025, team size 2, Miami.
5. Carnegie Mellon Tepper School news, 17 December 2024: Tepper School Undergraduate Student Makes History as Third-Youngest Funded by Y Combinator — https://www.cmu.edu/tepper/news/stories/2024/1217-ethan-hilton-y-combinator (grade C). Read in full. Source for the founding date, the three founders, the launch timing and the founder's age.
6. Caseflood website privacy notice, updated 13 October 2026 — https://www.caseflood.ai/privacy/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for PostHog, the LinkedIn Insight Tag, the Meta Pixel and RB2B on the marketing site.
7. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.

Contact: aiolum@livyden.com. Run Caseflood.ai? Send corrections or a verified figure to aiolum@livyden.com (subject: Correction: Caseflood.ai).