AI legal technology startup Ivo has raised a $55 million Series B round following a year of rapid revenue growth and expanded adoption among large enterprises. The San Francisco-based company develops AI software that helps in-house legal teams review, manage, and analyze contracts at scale.
The round was led by existing investor Blackbird, with participation from Costanoa Ventures, Uncork Capital, Fika Ventures, GD1, and Icehouse Ventures. The funding values the company at roughly five times its valuation from nine months ago, after annual recurring revenue increased sixfold during the same period.
Ivo focuses on contract intelligence for in-house legal teams, rather than law firms, a decision co-founder and CEO Min-Kyu Jung says shapes both the product and the company’s long term direction. “We want to serve in-house legal teams rather than law firms,” Jung said in an interview. “The problems they have are very distinct. In-house teams have one client, law firms have many, and that creates completely different dynamics for how contracts are reviewed and managed.”
Jung, a former corporate lawyer in New Zealand, founded the company in 2021 after becoming frustrated with the manual nature of contract review work. He taught himself to code and built the first version of the product before relocating the company’s headquarters to San Francisco in 2023.
Contracts remain one of the most resource-intensive workflows for legal departments. Large enterprises often manage hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of agreements, each containing terms that affect pricing, risk, compliance, and operations. According to Ivo, customers report saving up to 75 percent of the time typically spent on manual contract review.
The platform is designed to support both pre-signature review and post-signature analysis, each using different Ivo features. Ivo Review helps legal teams assess incoming agreements using company specific playbooks built by lawyers. Ivo Intelligence analyzes an organization’s full contract library, allowing teams to surface obligations, precedents, and patterns without manual tagging that current systems use.
“One of the hardest problems in building legal AI is accuracy,” Jung said. “Anything less than 100 percent accuracy feels unacceptable, but large language models are not perfectly accurate all the time.” To address this, Ivo uses a multi-step pipeline that chains together more than 400 model calls for each contract review. Each step is evaluated for accuracy, with the goal of producing outputs that are legible and auditable for lawyers using the system.
Jung compares the system to working with a junior lawyer. “Junior lawyers are not 100 percent accurate either, but their work is legible. You understand why a change was made. AI tools need to earn that same level of trust.”
The company’s approach has resonated with large enterprises. Customers include Uber, Shopify, Canva, Atlassian, Reddit, Pinterest, Quora, IBM, and BILL.com. Uber selected Ivo for its usability, accuracy, multilingual capabilities, and confidentiality safeguards, according to Kate Gardner, senior manager of contract operations at the company. “Ivo was intuitive to use, demonstrated a high level of accuracy, and met our confidentiality requirements,” Gardner said in the press release. “The Ivo team was highly responsive to Uber’s needs.”
Ivo reports a 134 percent increase in total customers since its last funding round and a 250 percent increase in adoption within Fortune 500 companies. The company currently employs just over 60 people and plans to more than triple headcount by the end of the year, with hiring focused on engineering, product, and legal expertise. New offices are planned in New York and London.
“In-house legal teams demand products that are deeply accurate and aligned to how they work. The most sophisticated teams are incredibly selective about the tools they trust,” said James Palmer, Principal at Blackbird. “Ivo’s traction with some of the world’s best companies shows it consistently exceeds that bar. With exceptional product execution and an uncompromising quality bar, we believe Ivo is defining and leading the category.”