Chariot Secures $10M to Combat Hidden Fees and Subscriptions

While assisting another founder in developing an app that gathered details on class-action settlements, Zim Hang came to understand how difficult it is for consumers to pursue compensation from corporations they feel have mistreated them.

He also learned about mass arbitration—a mechanism for handling individual claims when corporate contracts bar customers from joining class-action lawsuits. Simultaneously, he recognized that very few law firms were equipped to handle thousands of such claims simultaneously.

That exact void inspired the creation of Chariot Claims. The company has now secured $10 million in Series A funding, led by Silverton Partners, to assist consumers in seeking damages for alleged privacy violations, hidden fees, and difficult-to-cancel subscriptions. Additional participants in the financing round included Indicator Ventures, Lightbank, Neon Fund, ZVC, Rosecliff Ventures, Alumni Ventures, FJ Labs, Graph Ventures, and Vermilion Ventures.

The New York-based enterprise collaborates with law firms to pinpoint potential cases, track down affected consumers, and compile the data required to pursue payouts. This latest investment elevates the startup’s total fundraising to $15.7 million, following a $3.6 million seed round in April 2025 and a preceding pre-seed round.

Chariot’s new capital arrives amid a broader investment boom in legal technology. Crunchbase data shows that legal tech funding reached a historic peak last year with $4.6 billion invested. Startups in the legal tech sector have already pulled in over $3 billion so far this year, putting the industry on track to equal or surpass the 2025 total.

The Chariot workflow operates as follows: Consumers fill out an intake questionnaire that evaluates their preliminary eligibility in real time. Chariot’s team then analyzes these pre-qualified claims using a multi-layered combination of technology and human oversight before forwarding them to the partner law firm overseeing the litigation. Hang, the company’s CEO, shared with Crunchbase News that Chariot regularly processes more than 200,000 claim submissions each month and has taken on roughly 80 cases since transitioning to its present business model slightly over a year ago.

Operating with a team of about 15 employees, the business is currently breaking even, according to Hang. The newly acquired funds will be dedicated largely to hiring and product development, which includes creating AI tools to examine cases and evaluate consumer eligibility.

A Gap in Consumer Legal Services

Chariot marks Hang’s third startup. His entrepreneurial journey began with sleep research conducted during his studies in psychology and neuroscience 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 tech.

Across these diverse sectors, he noted that he routinely encountered convoluted systems where the goals of businesses and their consumers frequently conflicted. His time supporting the class-action settlement startup brought those frustrations into sharp focus.

Reflecting on the experience, he described feeling “frustrated and mystified and horrified by how our justice system works.”

Chariot was launched roughly three years ago, pivoting to its current framework after Hang identified an opportunity to support law firms managing mass arbitration. Traditional firms accustomed to standard class actions often find the operational demands of handling vast numbers of individual claimants overwhelming, he explained.

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

While partner firms manage the formal legal claims, Chariot takes care of the underlying administrative burdens. The startup bills the firms a flat service fee, while the legal practices operate on a contingency basis. Hang points out that because Chariot is not a law firm, it does not file claims directly.

The platform assists consumers with various types of grievances, including allegations that websites or mobile applications tracked user data without consent, that corporations added unexpected charges at checkout, or that companies made subscriptions effortless to sign up for but deliberately hard to cancel.

Finding Evidence and Drawing Objections

Chariot initiates its process by searching for potential cases involving hidden fees, privacy violations, and related consumer complaints. Its proprietary software scours public records—including federal court filings—and applies AI to examine the allegations, compiling research for partner law firms.

This research includes drafting legal memos grounded in publicly filed complaints. Furthermore, Chariot is developing applications to monitor shifts in legislation and legal rulings that might impact whether a case can move forward. This automation effort is still in its infancy, with the long-term goal of streamlining the manual research traditionally performed by associates and paralegals, Hang noted.

The company reviews several hundred prospective cases monthly, testing advertisements for around 30 potential scenarios to measure whether it can successfully reach eligible consumers. From there, it selects approximately 10 cases to pursue more deeply alongside partner law firms. Each individual case can involve countless consumers, whom Chariot connects with through digital advertising and partnerships with consumer fintech companies.

To verify eligibility, consumers must supply relevant documentation. For instance, in a data breach scenario, this might involve an official notice from the company reporting the data exposure. For a hidden-fee dispute, it could entail details regarding what was bought, the purchase date, and the amount paid.

Chariot is currently developing AI capabilities to review this supporting evidence automatically, helping verify whether a consumer qualifies, according to Hang. The exact evidence needed, and the complexity of confirming it, depends heavily on the specific type of alleged violation.

The startup aims to simplify this stage by allowing users to securely link their email accounts, enabling the software to scan for relevant documents autonomously rather than requiring users to manually fill out forms. Hang estimates that these enhancements could scale the company’s claims processing volume by 10 to 100 times.

Companies Push Back

Chariot’s strategy has not gone unopposed. Advertising campaigns designed to recruit claimants have drawn sharp pushback from targeted corporations. Hang revealed that Chariot has received cease-and-desist letters challenging, among other things, its utilization of company names and trademarks within advertisements.

Nonetheless, he maintains that naming these businesses is essential for reaching individuals who utilized their goods or services.

“As a part of our business, we need to mention the name of the company that has this alleged violation,” he stated.

Chariot evaluates these notices alongside legal counsel and complies with requests it deems legitimate, according to Hang, though he chose not to disclose specific corporate names for this report.

His overarching objective is to drive up the financial consequences for businesses engaging in alleged consumer abuses. By empowering more impacted customers to demand compensation, he believes corporations will face stronger monetary incentives to alter their business practices.

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

Mike Dodd, general partner at Silverton, shared via email that his firm was drawn to Chariot’s vertical AI strategy for partnering with law firms, describing the model 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 also highlighted the firm’s enthusiasm for “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,” Dodd 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.”

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Illustration: Dom Guzman