$81m growth capital for legal tech

Blackbird Ventures has led an $81 million Series B funding round for New Zealand-founded legal tech scale-up Ivo.

The new funding values the, now San Francisco-based, company at $530 million.

Ivo, which has Canva and Eventbrite as customers, has developed a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform designed to help in-house legal teams review, negotiate and manage large volumes of contracts.

Blackbird also contributed to Ivo’s $25.5 million Series A round early last year. That round was led by San Francisco venture firm Costanoa Ventures. Commitments also came from US venture firms Fika Ventures, Uncork Capital and NFDG (Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross) as well as New Zealand firms GD1 and Phase One Ventures.

Ivo was launched as Latch and changed its name to Ivo after raising a $4.8 million seed round in early 2024.

The company was started by, now chief executive, Min-kyu Jung, a former corporate lawyer, and chief technology officer Jacob Duligall, an ex-Xero software engineer.

Jung said the need for contract drafting software was made clear to him during his legal career when he spent much of his time “reviewing agreements line-by-line” and searching through internal record systems for precedents he knew existed. He left law and taught himself to code to develop a way to use artificial intelligence (AI) to draft contracts. At the time, the best it could do was to create basic templates.

But he stressed that the Ivo software was developed from the start to support the work of in-house lawyers not to replace their legal judgement.

The value of the technology in improving efficiency has been quickly recognised.

According to Jung, Ivo increased its annual recurring revenue rate sixfold over the past year and now has a customer base spanning Fortune 500 businesses and fast-growing technology companies, typically businesses that review thousands of contracts a year.

The Ivo team plan to use the new capital to expand and improve the capabilities of their software and accelerate international growth, including opening offices in London and New York.

Image: Ivo founders Jacob Duligall and Min-Kyu Jung.