Bell Gully Solicitor's AI Legal Tech Startup Secures $55M Funding

So does the aforementioned Uber, which three months ago signed on as an Ivo customer, joining a roster of recent wins that includes IBM (announced last week) and Reddit. “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,” Uber contract operations manager Kate Gardner said. The likes of Atlassian, Canva, Fonterra, Pinterest, Shopify, Quora and WordPress are also on Ivo’s slate. The Series B round, which followed a US$5m seed raise in April 2024 and a US$16m Series A in February 2025, was led by Australasia’s largest venture capital firm, Blackbird (an existing investor) and supported by new investors Costanoa Ventures, Uncork Capital, Fika Ventures. Two Kiwi firms, Global from Day One (an existing backer) and Icehouse Ventures also chipped in. The firm hasn’t released any financials, but says since its Series A round this time last year, it has grown annual recurring revenue by 500%, increased total customers by 134%, and expanded adoption within the Fortune 500 by 250%. Staff numbers have jumped from under 10 in 2024 to 29 in January last year to 80. The new funds will go toward product development, plus the opening of new offices in New York and London. Auckland University law school grad Jung left his first job – a solicitor with Bell Gully in Auckland – in 2021 to found Ivo with Jacob Duligal, a senior software engineer with Xero in Wellington. “When I was a corporate lawyer, contract review was among the most manual and time-consuming tasks,” Jung said. He and Duligall set out to solve that problem. The pair created AI-driven software that automates functions previously carried out by a junior staffer on a large company’s in-house legal team – similar territory to Tauranga’s LawVu, another recent start-up success story that recently raised new funding at a $400m valuation. The pair relocated to San Francisco, adjacent to Silicon Valley. Jung said the reason was simple: to be close to the world’s biggest pool of AI talent. And “close” is the operative word. Ivo is currently recruiting for 25 roles. All are listed as “on-site”. A Q&A section includes “Can I work remotely?” The answer: “We require candidates to work with us in-person five days a week in our San Francisco office.” Q&A with Ivo co-founder Min-Kyu Jung Herald: Among your target customers, what changes in attitude to AI have you seen since Ivo was founded, and over the past year? Jung: Our customers have gone from niche “early adopters” – usually at smaller companies – to widespread adoption across significant Fortune 500 companies in traditional industries such as banking, insurance and mining. Executive teams are increasingly acknowledging that AI has evolved from an experimental technology with narrow use cases to a significant platform shift that fundamentally changes the way legal work is done. There’s been a lot of commentary about entry-level white-collar jobs being lost to AI and the job market getting tougher for grads. Do you think that’s the case with legal teams? What we’re seeing is less about jobs being lost to AI and more about role evolution. In practice, we find that legal teams are chronically under-resourced relative to their workload, and AI can finally give them the capacity to do more; we see in-house teams able to actually review contracts that used to get rubber-stamped, or extract insights from historical agreements that would have been impossibly time-consuming and expensive to achieve manually. Have shifting US visa policies impacted your hiring? They have not. Why do you require people to work on site? We think it’s harder to build great companies remotely. This isn’t because people can’t be productive from home; it’s because we’re early enough that we’re not executing on an existing playbook, but writing it. This requires fast, spontaneous context-sharing for iterative decision making, which is much easier to do in person. What’s your edge over rivals in the same space? We win 85% of head-to-head trials against competitors. There are a few reasons for this. First, Ivo has best-in-class accuracy; our Intelligence solution has a 97% score against the CUAD (the Contract Understanding Atticus Dataset) dataset. In fact, many of Ivo’s “incorrect” results against CUAD are due to errors in the expert human annotations, so the real accuracy score is closer to 98%. Ivo also chains together over 400 model calls for every contract review and analyses entire agreements holistically rather than chunking them by provisions. Second, we’ve solved what we describe as the “on-boarding problem”. [The aforementioned characterisation of many AI systems as a junior staffer with no memory]. Ivo avoids this problem by accessing deep, relevant context from the company’s existing data sources, such as preferred negotiating positions and precedent agreements, to generate more useful results.