San Francisco legal teams do not wake up excited about contracts. They wake up buried under them. PDFs stacked like bad decisions, redlines arguing with each other, revenue waiting on signatures,...
San Francisco legal teams do not wake up excited about contracts. They wake up buried under them. PDFs stacked like bad decisions, redlines arguing with each other, revenue waiting on signatures, risk hiding in footnotes. That tension is where Ivo lives. This week, Ivo announced a $55M Series B led by Blackbird, with Costanoa Ventures, Uncork Capital, Fika Ventures, GD1, and new investor Icehouse Ventures joining the round, pushing the company to an approximate $355M valuation and signaling that contract intelligence has officially graduated from “nice to have” to boardroom mandatory.
Ivo did not start in Silicon Valley with a pitch deck and a slogan. It started in New Zealand in March 2021 when Min-Kyu Jung was a corporate lawyer at Bell Gully, grinding through manual contract review and realizing the job was less law and more archaeology. He left practice, taught himself to code, and built what became Latch before reintroducing the company to the world as Ivo in April 2024, a nod to Ivo of Kermartin, the patron saint of lawyers. Purpose matters when accuracy is the product. Jacob Duligall joined as Co-Founder and CTO, bringing the engineering muscle from Xero and Snapper Services Limited to turn frustration into infrastructure.
Today, Ivo is an enterprise-grade AI contract intelligence platform built only for in-house legal teams. Not law firms. Not generic AI. It breaks contract review into more than 400 discrete tasks, producing redlines that read like a seasoned lawyer wrote them, not a machine guessing its way through a clause. The Repository and Assistant products, launched in 2025, connect entire agreement portfolios, detect relationships with 97% accuracy against the CUAD benchmark, and answer questions in minutes that used to take months. That precision has driven 500% ARR growth year over year, 134% customer growth, and a 250% expansion in Fortune 500 adoption.
Customers like Uber, Shopify, Atlassian, IBM, Canva, and Reddit are not buying hype. They are buying time, visibility, and control. James Palmer of Blackbird said the most sophisticated legal teams are the most selective, and Ivo keeps clearing that bar. Min-Kyu Jung says every business relationship lives inside a contract, and most companies still cannot see what they already signed. Arie Jongejan and the sales team turned that insight into seven figure ARR quarters. This raise is not about speed. It is about trust at scale, and once contracts start talking back, the rest of the organization listens.