Ivo Raises $55m for Contract AI + 5Xs ARR

Ivo, a contract intelligence platform for inhouse lawyers, has raised a $55m Series B funding round led by existing investor Blackbird. The New Zealand startup that is now based in San Francisco also said it had 5X-ed its ARR since its last funding round in February last year – which was for $16m – and more than doubled its customers, including among Fortune 500 companies.

The new capital will support product development and scaling as the company seeks to add to customers such as Uber, Shopify, Atlassian, Reddit, and Canva, they added.

Interestingly, the company explained that its ‘long-term vision is to elevate contracts into strategic assets for every business’ – and $55m is a solid amount of cash to spend, if the goal is a rapid growth arc with a new round to come in the not too distant future.

And that all sounds good, but what does Ivo do? Well, it’s a multi-capability platform that handles contract review, playbook development, and has legal research in addition. See below.

Other features include IVO automatically identifying connections between agreements; and it can highlight standard legal positions, ‘allowing contracting teams to operate with greater clarity and control’.

Min-Kyu Jung, CEO and Co-founder of Ivo (pictured above with co-founder, Jacob Duligall), commented: ‘Our goal has always been to make interacting with contracts fast, accurate, and enjoyable. Every key relationship in a business is defined by an agreement, yet most organizations struggle to extract the insights inside them. Our focus is to give in-house teams a trustworthy solution that helps them work faster and gives them visibility into their contracts that was previously impossible.’

While customer, Kate Gardner, Senior Manager, Contract Operations at Uber, noted that: ‘Uber selected Ivo because it was intuitive to use, demonstrated a high level of accuracy, could work in multiple languages, and met its confidentiality requirements. Furthermore, the Ivo team was highly responsive to Uber’s needs.’

Is this a big deal? Clearly for Ivo and it’s also something of a bellwether signal of how hot the inhouse contract AI space is getting, with more and more legal tech companies expanding into this market segment.

Some of the players are broad AI platforms and see helping inhouse contract needs as one part of their offering, while others are more focused on developing agentic workflows – but which also connect directly to contract review. And at the same time we have the many CLM players, most of which have caught up now with genAI capabilities and are quite intentionally focusing their marketing efforts on contract AI needs. Plus, just to add some extra pressure to the market, we now have a growing range of ‘NewMods’ offering AI-first solutions, such as Crosby, to handle corporates’ more standard contracting needs. And that’s even before we mention traditional ALSPs…..

In short, inhouse buyers have a growing choice of options now for contract review needs – and with the new fundraise Ivo will be making sure they’re in the mix as well. Plus, it has to be said, they’ve already scored some significant client wins.  

Other investors in this round included Costanoa Ventures, Uncork Capital, Fika Ventures, GD1 and Icehouse Ventures.

More about Ivo here.