New Zealand AI startup Ivo has raised $55 million in Series B funding for its platform, which helps in-house legal teams review, negotiate, and manage large volumes of contracts.
The round was led by Blackbird, which also backed Ivo’s $25.5 million Series A in February 2025. The deal values Ivo at between about $350 million and $530 million, according to conflicting reports.
Founded by former corporate lawyer Min-Kyu Jung and ex-Xero engineer Jacob Duligall, Ivo grew out of Jung’s frustration with the repetitive nature of contract work.
Speaking about the raise in a blog post, Jung said he had spent his legal career “reviewing agreements line by line” and searching internal systems for precedents he knew already existed. As a result, he left law and taught himself to code because he believed “there had to be a better way”.
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Jung said the company was founded on an early conviction that AI could meaningfully improve how in-house legal teams operate, but only if it was designed to support rather than replace legal judgment.
At the time, he said, “AI for legal meant keyword search and basic templates”, and the challenge was convincing general counsel that AI could actually understand contract language.
Ivo says its customer base now spans Fortune 500 enterprises and fast-growing technology companies that review thousands of contracts each year, and that growth has been driven by a focus on reliability rather than automation for its own sake.
Jung said the company had grown annual recurring revenue sixfold over the past year by helping legal teams move faster “without sacrificing quality”, noting that “lawyers are skeptical and discerning” and that trust is earned through product performance rather than marketing.
The company’s core product operates within Microsoft Word, where lawyers already draft and negotiate agreements, surfacing risks and suggesting redlines in real-time.
Ivo has also expanded into contract intelligence, turning executed agreements into structured data that legal teams can query to understand obligations, relationships across contracts, and deviations from standard terms.
Ivo plans to use the fresh capital to expand its platform, expand enterprise capabilities, and accelerate international growth, including opening offices in London and New York.
Jung said the responsibility that comes with applying AI to legal work was significant, describing legal teams as trusting the company with “some of their most important work”, and emphasising the need to get it right.
