Ivo chief technology officer Jacob Duligall (left) and chief executive Min-Kyu Jung.
Ivo chief technology officer Jacob Duligall (left) and chief executive Min-Kyu Jung.
Ivo, an Auckland-founded start-up that uses AI to review legal contracts, has raised US$16 million ($28m) in a Series A venture capital round.
The firm was founded two years ago by its chief executive, Auckland University law school grad and ex-Bell Gully solicitor Min-Kyu Jung, with Jacob Duligall,a former senior software engineer with Xero in Wellington.
“When I was a corporate lawyer, contract review was among the most manual and time-consuming tasks,” Jung says.
He and Duligall set out to solve that problem. The pair created an artificial intelligence app that automates functions previously carried out by a junior staffer on a large company’s in-house legal team – similar territory to Tauranga’s LawVu, another recent start-up success story.
When the Herald last caught up with Jung in April last year – on the heels of a US$4.8m seed round – Ivo had seven staff.
It now boasts 35, 20 of them in its new home base of San Francisco.
Ivo now has 150 corporate customers, including Fonterra, Canva, Weightwatchers, Eventbrite, Blue Cross Blue Shield Kansas City, and several Fortune 500 companies, Jung says.
“Contracts are foundational to commerce, but reviewing them is a key bottleneck for important business processes,” he says.
“By using AI to reduce the time, effort and cost of negotiating contracts, we’re making it easier for businesses to work together.”
The new funds will be used for expansion. Ivo is hiring more software engineers, and has just released a search agent. Jung says it eliminates the need for metadata tagging, and means “legal teams can now search and generate reports across their entire contract portfolio regardless of where documents are stored, whether in cloud storage solutions like Box and SharePoint or local computers”.
“Agents” are AIs that can perform specific tasks, such as troubleshooting queries sent to a helpdesk, without human intervention. So-called “agentic AI” has recently been pushed by heavyweights like Microsoft and Salesforce.
Ivo Agent Search.
“Agents are clearly an important breakthrough in AI that will meaningfully change the way a lot of work is done,” Jung says.
“The industry is still very early in the development of interesting products that take advantage of agentic capabilities, but if we extrapolate the trend over the coming years, we can expect agents to be increasingly useful and transformative.
“Ivo has already incorporated agent-based workflows into our products where it makes sense and delivers value for our users.”
Can you trust a robot lawyer?
Last year, when asked if Ivo’s clients could trust a robot lawyer, Jung said his firm’s AI output had to be checked – but framed that as no different to the work of a junior lawyer, which would also be vetted by someone more senior in a more traditional set-up. But the AI provided a faster, lower-cost process to get to that stage.
“My position here remains the same,” Jung told the Herald this week. “Moreover, as model capabilities improve, it seems that hallucinations are increasingly less of a problem.”
He said Ivo lets firms set their own “guardrails”, with options to automatically escalate queries up the food chain of human lawyers.
Silicon Valley backers
The US$16m round was led by Costanoa Ventures, a Silicon Valley VC that says it specialises in early-stage fintech and enterprise software companies.
“We were incredibly impressed with Costanoa after having a chance to spend time with them. They align closely with us on our vision for the future of contracting,” Jung says.
Ivo was originally called Latch but after finding a NYSE-listed firm of the same name, switched to Ivo after Ivo of Kermartin, the patron saint of lawyers.
The raise was supported by other VC firms including Fika Ventures and Uncork – the two Silicon Valley VCs that led the US$4.8m round last year, plus Australasian venture capital player Blackbird and NZ’s Global From Day One (GD1) and Phase One Ventures.
While legal automation is an increasingly crowded AI field, Jung’s pitch is the competition prioritises speed, while Ivo “sets new standards for accuracy”.
“The platform automatically checks agreements against company requirements, generates specific suggestions for resolving discrepancies, and creates compromise language between conflicting clauses,” he says.
“Unlike competitors that treat legal review as a simple automation problem, Ivo’s sophisticated AI produces naturalistic redlines that mirror the work of experienced attorneys, maintaining consistent terminology and making minimal necessary changes.”
Jung’s brag-list quotes now include the in-house law team for one of the busiest sites on the internet – crowdsourced answers site Quora.
“Ivo reduced our average time to approve counter-party NDAs [non-disclosure agreements] for signatures from four days to two, while first-pass turn improved from an average of 11 hours to five minutes,” says Adrie Christiansen, who until earlier this month was Quora’s legal operations lead.
Jung would not disclose a post-money valuation for his firm, which was incorporated in Delaware.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
