Now based in San Francisco, Ivo is tapping into demand from the AI-driven revolution of the legal industry. Australian VC Blackbird contributed to the raise and sees value in the product.
After graduating from law school, Min-Kyu Jung spent one year as a Solicitor with a New Zealand law firm. By 2021, Jung left the practice of law to help solve a problem he and many other lawyers faced.
“When I was a corporate lawyer, contract review was amongst the most manual and time-consuming tasks,” says Jung. “The legal profession is in the early stages of an AI-driven transformation. Our vision is to give every legal team the power to handle enterprise-scale contract volumes while maintaining the highest standards of accuracy and control.”
Four years after Jung and CTO Jacob Duligall founded Ivo, the startup says it can cut contract review time by 75%.
“We have explosive, hockey stick growth and strong adoption from die-hard loyal users at Fortune 500’s and household brands,” Jung states on LinkedIn. “We’re based in San Francisco, but we hire exceptional talent from all around the world.”
This week, Australian VC Blackbird announced it has invested in Ivo’s $16-million Series A raise, alongside deal lead Costanoa Ventures, as well as Fika Ventures, Uncork Capital, NFDG, GD1, and Phase One Ventures.
According to Ivo, its service is used by Canva, Eventbrite and WeightWatchers, along with around 150 other corporate legal teams. The service Ivo provides goes beyond automating contract review, the company says.
“The platform automatically checks agreements against company requirements, generates specific suggestions for resolving discrepancies, and creates compromise language between conflicting clauses. 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,” the company states.
The legal operations lead at Quora says Ivo has halved the time it takes to execute some legal documents, and made other tasks significantly more efficient.
“Ivo reduced our average time to approve counterparty NDAs for signatures from four days to two, while first pass turn improved from an average of 11 hours to 5 minutes,” says Adrie Christiansen, who heads up Quora’s Legal Operations.
Statistics like these got the attention of Costanoa Ventures and other VC firms.
“Ivo is fundamentally transforming contract review for lawyers and legal teams,” says Amy Cheetham, a partner at Coastanoa Ventures. “By leveraging AI to manage the meticulous, painstaking work of contract review, Ivo gives legal teams tools designed by lawyers to work faster with greater accuracy.”
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