So does the aforementioned Uber, which three months ago signed on as an Ivo customer, joining a roster of recent wins that includes IBM (announced last week) and Reddit.<\/p>\n
Ivo co-founders Min-Kyu Jung (chief executive) and Jacob Duligall (chief technology officer).<\/p>\n
\u201cUber selected Ivo because it was intuitive to use, demonstrated a high level of accuracy, could work in multiple languages, and met its confidentiality requirements,\u201d Uber contract operations manager Kate Gardner said.<\/p>\n
The likes of Atlassian, Canva, Fonterra, Pinterest, Shopify, Quora and WordPress are also on Ivo\u2019s slate.<\/p>\n
The Series B round, which followed a US$5m seed raise in April 2024 and a US$16m Series A in February 2025, was led by Australasia\u2019s largest venture capital firm, Blackbird (an existing investor) and supported by new investors Costanoa Ventures, Uncork Capital, Fika Ventures. Two Kiwi firms, Global from Day One (an existing backer) and Icehouse Ventures also chipped in.<\/p>\n
The firm hasn\u2019t released any financials, but says since its Series A round this time last year, it has grown annual recurring revenue by 500%, increased total customers by 134%, and expanded adoption within the Fortune 500 by 250%.<\/p>\n
Staff numbers have jumped from under 10 in 2024 to 29 in January last year to 80.<\/p>\n
The new funds will go toward product development, plus the opening of new offices in New York and London.<\/p>\n
Auckland University law school grad Jung left his first job \u2013 a solicitor with Bell Gully in Auckland \u2013 in 2021 to found Ivo with Jacob Duligal, a senior software engineer with Xero in Wellington.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I was a corporate lawyer, contract review was among the most manual and time-consuming tasks,\u201d Jung said.<\/p>\n
He and Duligall set out to solve that problem. The pair created AI-driven software that automates functions previously carried out by a junior staffer on a large company\u2019s in-house legal team \u2013 similar territory to Tauranga\u2019s LawVu<\/a>, another recent start-up success story that recently raised new funding at a $400m valuation<\/a>.<\/p>\n The pair relocated to San Francisco, adjacent to Silicon Valley. Jung said the reason was simple: to be close to the world\u2019s biggest pool of AI talent.<\/p>\n And \u201cclose\u201d is the operative word.<\/p>\n Ivo is currently recruiting for 25 roles. All are listed as \u201con-site\u201d. A Q&A section includes \u201cCan I work remotely?\u201d The answer: \u201cWe require candidates to work with us in-person five days a week in our San Francisco office.\u201d<\/p>\n Q&A with Ivo co-founder Min-Kyu Jung<\/p>\n Herald: Among your target customers, what changes in attitude to AI have you seen since Ivo was founded, and over the past year?<\/p>\n Jung: Our customers have gone from niche \u201cearly adopters\u201d \u2013 usually at smaller companies \u2013 to widespread adoption across significant Fortune 500 companies in traditional industries such as banking, insurance and mining.<\/p>\n Executive teams are increasingly acknowledging that AI has evolved from an experimental technology with narrow use cases to a significant platform shift that fundamentally changes the way legal work is done.<\/p>\n There\u2019s been a lot of commentary about entry-level white-collar jobs being lost to AI and the job market getting tougher for grads. Do you think that\u2019s the case with legal teams?<\/p>\n What we\u2019re seeing is less about jobs being lost to AI and more about role evolution. <\/p>\n In practice, we find that legal teams are chronically under-resourced relative to their workload, and AI can finally give them the capacity to do more; we see in-house teams able to actually review contracts that used to get rubber-stamped, or extract insights from historical agreements that would have been impossibly time-consuming and expensive to achieve manually.<\/p>\n Have shifting US visa policies impacted your hiring?<\/p>\n They have not.<\/p>\n Why do you require people to work on site?<\/p>\n We think it\u2019s harder to build great companies remotely. This isn\u2019t because people can\u2019t be productive from home; it\u2019s because we\u2019re early enough that we\u2019re not executing on an existing playbook, but writing it. This requires fast, spontaneous context-sharing for iterative decision making, which is much easier to do in person.<\/p>\n What\u2019s your edge over rivals in the same space? <\/p>\n We win 85% of head-to-head trials against competitors. <\/p>\n There are a few reasons for this. First, Ivo has best-in-class accuracy; our Intelligence solution has a 97% score against the CUAD (the Contract Understanding Atticus Dataset) dataset. In fact, many of Ivo\u2019s \u201cincorrect\u201d results against CUAD are due to errors in the expert human annotations, so the real accuracy score is closer to 98%.<\/p>\n Ivo also chains together over 400 model calls for every contract review and analyses entire agreements holistically rather than chunking them by provisions.<\/p>\n Second, we\u2019ve solved what we describe as the \u201con-boarding problem\u201d. [The aforementioned characterisation of many AI systems as a junior staffer with no memory].<\/p>\n Ivo avoids this problem by accessing deep, relevant context from the company\u2019s existing data sources, such as preferred negotiating positions and precedent agreements, to generate more useful results.<\/p>\n Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald\u2019s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So does the aforementioned Uber, which three months ago signed on as an Ivo customer, joining a roster…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":242940,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,1975,51179,142540,25337,2082,30185,293,101215,20053,6712,13840,111,139,69,11596,762,5149,104191,1037,4412,370,145,9438,7489,142542,142541,16541],"class_list":["post-242939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-at","tag-contracts","tag-exbell","tag-firms","tag-for","tag-gully","tag-his","tag-inhouse","tag-lawyer","tag-legal","tag-like","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-raises","tag-review","tag-robot","tag-solicitor","tag-startup","tag-teams","tag-tech","tag-technology","tag-trust","tag-uber","tag-us355m","tag-us55m","tag-valuation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}