Legal AI pioneer Luminance has raised $75m in a Series C funding round led by Point72 Private Investments, taking the total amount raised in the last 12 months to over $115m, and $165m overall, according to a spokesperson.
The oversubscribed round included participation from Forestay Capital, RPS Ventures and Schroders Capital, as well as existing investors including March Capital, National Grid Partners and Slaughter and May.
Sally Wokes, Partner at Slaughter and May, said: ‘We continue to work closely with the Luminance team, and it is exciting to see this latest funding round success. The legal AI market is developing at a rapid rate, and we wish Luminance every success as they continue to harness this demand and pioneer new developments in AI.’
Slaughters was one of the early investors and backers of Luminance through some of its partners’ close friendship with the company’s creator, the late Mike Lynch.
UK-based Luminance noted that they now work with over 700 organisations in 70+ countries, including AMD, Hitachi, LG Chem, SiriusXM, Rolls-Royce, and Lamborghini – underlining how they have shifted a lot of their focus onto the inhouse world. They added that they have seen significant growth, with 5x customer increase and 6x ARR growth in two years.
They also have recently opened offices in San Francisco, Dallas and Toronto, and the company has expanded its US HQ in New York. Plus they’ve just released their Lumi Go tool, for genAI-driven contract negotiation.
Eleanor Lightbody, CEO of Luminance, said: ‘This funding is all about innovation, expansion and scaling. It supercharges our US growth, where 40% of our revenue is already generated, and will fuel key hires and new offices across the US, APAC and Europe.
‘It also accelerates innovation at our Cambridge R&D hub as we expand Luminance’s AI platform to legal adjacent use cases in procurement and compliance. With Point72 Private Investments’ deep legal tech expertise, we are setting the benchmark for end-to-end, legal-grade AI for enterprise.’
Sri Chandrasekar, Managing Partner of Point72 Private Investments, said: ‘We know this market well and strongly believe in the power of next-generation AI to revolutionise contracting processes across the enterprise. We are excited to back Luminance as it continues building a specialist and trusted technology that has already been adopted by many of the world’s largest organizations. Their team, strategy and vision positions them well to win this market.’
Note: Point72 has also previously invested in CLM company Lexion (bought by DocuSign).
Is this a big deal?
Well, a few years ago this would have been massive, now we almost expect fast-growth legal tech companies, especially if focused on AI, to bag huge amounts of cash to try and take market share. After all, Harvey just bagged $300m and is probably going to burn through that cash with very high growth targets.
We can expect more and more money to flow into legal AI companies as they battle it out across the globe, hoping to build market share, with likely a big chunk of that fresh cash spent by these companies on sales teams and marketing. I.e. they have the product – they just need a lot of businesses to buy it now.
Whatever happens next there is everything to play for and Luminance, which started out with NLP/ML and now is fully into genAI, is really going for it.