Legal tech startup Ivo raises $25.5 million for AI contract tool used by Canva, Eventbrite
New Zealand startup Ivo has raised $25.5 million in fresh funding to scale its AI-powered contract review tech.
A legal tech startup using AI to help businesses cut down on the time, effort and costs spent on contracts has raised $25.5 million (US$16 million) via a Series A funding round to streamline its plans to scale its AI-powered contract review solution.
Ivo was founded in New Zealand by CEO Min-Kyu Jung, a former corporate lawyer who practised in Australia before leaving his legal career behind to learn how to code and build the startup, and its chief technology officer Jacob Duligall.
The round was led by San Francisco-based venture capital firm Costanoa Ventures with participation from US venture firms Fika Ventures, Uncork Capital and NFDG (Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross), along with local VC Blackbird and New Zealand funds GD1 and Phase One Ventures.
The Series A round takes Ivo’s total funding to US$22.2 million, which also includes early backing from investor and co-founder of US AI startup Safe Superintelligence Inc Daniel Gross. In early April 2024, the startup revealed it had completed a $4.8 million seed round and rebranded from Latch to Ivo.
Speaking with SmartCompany, Ivo CEO and co-founder Min-Kyu Jung said he founded the startup because he believes contracts are the most important business technology in human history.
“So it was worthwhile making the process of working with them better,” he says.
“We decided to open the funding round because we need more funding to support our growing base of global enterprise clients; and our R&D efforts for new product launches. We had also hit an inflection point from a growth perspective which justified the additional funding.
“We plan on investing heavily into R&D to support both improvements to our core products and the addition of new products. We also plan on adding more staff to support our growing base of enterprise clients.”
Jung says Ivo is solving contract review and negotiation for legal teams.
“Up until recently, redlining was almost completely impervious to attempts at automation by technology because it required human judgement; generative AI has finally started to change this,” he says.
“Ivo can review agreements for risks and consistency against playbooks; it then generates redline recommendations, comments, and reports.
“Ivo chains together 400+ model calls for each review, and uses its own proprietary data structure to ensure contracts are being processed accurately.”
Canva, Eventbrite among Ivo’s corporate clients
The startup, which is now headquartered in San Francisco, has more than 150 companies using its tech, including Canva, Eventbrite, Fonterra, Weightwatchers and several Fortune 500 firms.
Ivo is primarily used by in-house legal teams that need to process high volumes of contracts, explains Jung.
“We serve all kinds of customers across different industries and sizes, but we tend to work more with larger, more sophisticated legal teams that need to enforce standardised negotiating processes across their entire organisation,” he says.
These teams are seeing tangible gains in terms of contract review efficiency, says Jung. One client, Quora, has told Ivo that it has been able to reduce the average time to approve counterparty non-disclosure agreements for signature from four days to two days. The Quora legal team claims it has also been able to reduce the average time for first-pass turns of counterparty paper from 11 hours to five minutes.
“The less obvious use case is that increasingly non-legal teams are using Ivo for the first-pass of a contract review before they get escalated up to the legal team” adds Jung.
“With Ivo, it’s possible to set strict guardrails, in the form of ‘playbooks’, so that business users are given a menu of pre-configured standard and fallback options to choose from when negotiating contracts.”
As well as its Series A funding round, Ivo has also launched its Ivo Search Agent product, which allows users to search, query, and generate reports of their entire dataset of contracts with natural language queries.
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