Legal tech startup Ivo announced the completion of a successful Series A round totaling $16 million, with a lead from Costanoa Ventures, while Uncork Capital, NFDG, Fika Ventures, GD1, Phase One Ventures, and Blackbird VC co-led the investment. 

This will put Ivo’s total funds to $22.2 million following a previous seed round amounting to $4.8 million in April 2024.

About Company

Ivo was founded in April 2023 and has quickly become a leader in the legal technology industry. The company provides an AI-powered contract platform that is supposed to help lawyers by suggesting contract edits, automatically comparing contracts with company requirements, and redlining. This approach is meant to make the contract negotiation process faster and less time-consuming, thus saving time and effort in the review process.

The Need for AI in Contract Negotiation

Contract negotiation is one of the most significant bottlenecks in the contract lifecycle. Legal teams spend hours performing manual redlining and revisions to guarantee accuracy. Where contracts are going, in-house lawyers are being asked to review more than ever before. 

Traditional automation tools prioritize speed over accuracy; thus, legal teams should choose between efficiency and reliability. Ivo addresses this challenge by offering a solution that balances both, providing reliable AI contract review at scale. 

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Ivo’s AI-Powered Solutions

Ivo has come up with a revolutionary way of reviewing contracts that redefines accuracy. It automatically scans agreements in relation to their requirements set by companies, brings out specific suggestions for the remedy of differences, and makes compromise language for conflicting clauses.

Ivo’s robust AI differs from competitors who view legal review as a simple problem to be automated; instead, it produces redlines with a close resemblance to that of an experienced attorney, with consistent terminologies and minimal adjustments if necessar

In addition to the core contract review capabilities, Ivo has brought in the Ivo Search Agent, a tool for contract search that will end the practice of manual metadata tagging. This enhances the efficiency of the platform because legal teams can quickly find and reference contract information without manually entering it into the system, thus saving them so much time.

Impact on Legal Teams

The impact of Ivo’s solutions on legal teams has been immediate and significant.

For example, Quora’s Legal Operations Lead, Adrie Christiansen stated that Ivo decreased the average time to approve counterparty NDAs for signatures from four days to two and improved the first pass turn from an average of 11 hours to 5 minutes. 

Geotab’s legal team observed an average saving of 45 minutes per contract review – a 75% gain in efficiency, making it possible for lawyers to spend more time on strategic work. 

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Leadership and Vision

Ivo is led by CEO and co-founder Min-Kyu Jung, who was once a corporate lawyer, witnessing the inefficiencies of human contract review. Determined to solve this problem, Jung abandoned his career in law, learned to code himself, and began building what eventually became Ivo. 

Following meetings with hundreds of legal professionals and iterations on numerous versions of the product, his team produced a solution lawyers could trust.

Future Ambitions

With this new investment, Ivo is looking forward to scaling up its AI-based contract review solution so that it may help corporate legal teams to efficiently negotiate their contracts. It also aims at constant innovation and platform expansion as needs change within various industries in relation to the changing needs of lawyers.