Exclusive: Chariot Raises $10M To Help Consumers Fight Back Against Hidden Fees And Hard-To-Cancel Subscriptions

While assisting another founder in developing an app that gathered information on class-action settlements, Zim Hang came to understand just how difficult it is for everyday individuals to seek financial relief from companies they feel have wronged them.

He also learned about mass arbitration, a method for pursuing individual claims when corporate contracts block customers from participating in class actions. At the same time, he recognized that very few law firms were equipped to handle thousands of those claims simultaneously.

That exact gap served as the foundation for Chariot Claims. The enterprise has now secured $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Silverton Partners to assist consumers in pursuing claims related to alleged privacy violations, hidden fees, and subscriptions that are hard to cancel. Additional participants in the financing included Indicator Ventures, Lightbank, Neon Fund, ZVC, Rosecliff Ventures, Alumni Ventures, FJ Labs, Graph Ventures, and Vermilion Ventures.

Operating out of New York, the startup collaborates with law firms to spot potential legal cases, locate affected consumers, and compile the data required to pursue compensation. This latest investment elevates the firm’s total funding to $15.7 million, incorporating a $3.6 million seed round completed in April 2025 and a prior pre-seed round.

Chariot’s new funding arrives amid a massive wave of investment within the legal technology sector. According to Crunchbase data, funding directed at legal tech reached an all-time peak last year with $4.6 billion invested. Legal tech startups have already brought in upwards of $3 billion so far this year, keeping the sector on track to match or surpass the 2025 total.

The workflow at Chariot operates as follows: Consumers fill out an intake questionnaire for each case to evaluate preliminary eligibility instantly. Chariot’s staff then screens these pre-qualified claims through a multi-tier framework combining technology and human oversight prior to forwarding them to the partner law firm overseeing the case. Hang, who serves as the company’s CEO, informed Crunchbase News that Chariot generally processes upwards of 200,000 claim submissions every month and has taken on roughly 80 cases since pivoting to its current business model just over a year ago.

He noted that the enterprise maintains a team of roughly 15 employees and currently operates at a break-even point. The newly acquired capital will be dedicated primarily to hiring and product development, which includes building artificial intelligence tools to review cases and evaluate whether consumers meet the criteria to participate.

A gap in consumer legal services

Chariot marks Hang’s third venture as a founder. His initial enterprise originated from sleep research he conducted while pursuing psychology and neuroscience studies at Washington University. He translated those findings into a smart-pillow venture before selling its intellectual property to a medical-device company. Afterward, he worked across healthcare technology and fintech, established a Web3 startup, and ultimately transitioned into legal technology.

Across all of those fields, he observed convoluted systems where the motivations of businesses and their clientele were frequently out of alignment. His time assisting the class-action settlement startup brought those concerns directly into focus.

He stated that he was “frustrated and mystified and horrified by how our justice system works.”

Chariot was launched approximately three years ago, adopting its present model after Hang spotted an opportunity to assist law firms in managing mass arbitration. He noted that firms accustomed to traditional class actions often struggle with the heavy operational demands of handling massive volumes of individual claimants.

“It’s just really inefficient for them to try to build workflows around 10,000 claimants or 100,000 claimants,” Hang said.

While Chariot manages segments of that administrative burden, its partner firms handle the actual legal claims. The startup bills the firms flat service fees, while the legal practices operate on a contingency fee basis. Hang points out that because Chariot is not a law firm, the company itself does not file legal claims.

The enterprise aids consumers in pursuing a diverse range of claims. Examples include allegations that websites or apps tracked user data without authorization, that companies tacked on unexpected fees during the checkout process, or that businesses made subscriptions effortless to sign up for but deliberately difficult to terminate.

Finding evidence and drawing objections

Chariot kicks off its process by searching for prospective cases involving privacy breaches, hidden fees, and related consumer grievances. Its software sifts through public records—such as federal court documents—and uses AI to analyze the accusations and assemble research for its partner law firms.

That research encompasses legal memos derived from publicly filed complaints. Additionally, Chariot is creating tools to monitor shifts in legislation and judicial rulings that could impact whether a case is permitted to move forward. Hang explains that this work is still in its early phases, with the long-term objective of automating a significant portion of the research tasks typically assigned to associates and paralegals.

He mentioned that Chariot evaluates a few hundred prospective cases every month. It tests advertisements for roughly 30 potential cases to measure whether it can successfully locate consumers possessing a valid claim, and subsequently picks about 10 to pursue more thoroughly alongside its partner law firms. Each individual case can encompass numerous consumers, whom Chariot reaches via digital advertising and collaborations with consumer financial technology companies.

To verify if they hold a valid claim, consumers must supply relevant details. For instance, in the event of a data breach, this might involve an official notice from the business stating that their personal data was compromised. For a hidden-fee grievance, documentation might comprise what was purchased, the transaction date, and the total amount paid.

According to Hang, Chariot is actively developing AI tools to streamline the review of this supporting documentation and confirm whether a consumer qualifies. The evidence required—along with the difficulty of verifying it—differs depending on the nature of the alleged infraction.

The startup intends to simplify this phase by permitting users to link their email accounts so that the software can automatically scan for pertinent documents, eliminating the need for consumers to manually fill out forms. Hang estimates that these kinds of enhancements could empower the company to scale its claim volume by 10 to 100 times.

Companies push back

Not everyone welcomes Chariot’s approach. Marketing efforts aimed at finding potential claimants have triggered sharp pushback from several targeted companies. In fact, Chariot has been served with cease-and-desist letters disputing, among other things, the utilization of corporate names and trademarks within its advertisements, Hang noted.

Nevertheless, he maintains that naming those corporations is essential to successfully connecting with individuals who utilized 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.

Hang explained that Chariot reviews these letters alongside its legal counsel and complies with any demands it finds legitimate. He declined to disclose the names of specific companies for this publication.

His overarching objective is to drive up the financial consequences for businesses engaging in alleged consumer abuses. He reasons that if a larger share of impacted customers seek financial redress, companies will experience a much greater economic incentive to reform those practices.

“We want to make unethical unprofitable,” he said.

Mike Dodd, general partner at Silverton, shared via email with Crunchbase News that his fund was drawn to Chariot’s vertical AI strategy for partnering with law firms, characterizing it as “exciting and defensible.”

“It’s a greenfield market with space to expand horizontally and eventually into a generalized consumer legal AI solution,” he wrote. He added that the venture capital firm was equally compelled by what he termed “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.”

Frequently Asked Questions

• What does Chariot do? Chariot works with law firms to identify potential consumer cases, gather information, and streamline mass arbitration claims related to privacy violations, hidden fees, and hard-to-cancel subscriptions.
• Is Chariot a law firm? No, Chariot is not a law firm and does not file claims itself. It provides administrative and technology support to partner law firms.
• How much funding has Chariot raised? Chariot has raised a total of $15.7 million, including a recent $10 million Series A round led by Silverton Partners.

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Illustration: Dom Guzman