By Aditya Soni
Jan 20 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence startup Ivo raised $55 million in a funding round, led by existing investor Blackbird, to speed up development of its legal services platform and hire more salespeople to tap growing demand.
The Series B round, announced on Tuesday, valued the company at around $355 million, according to a source familiar with the matter. It was joined by new investors Costanoa Ventures, Uncork Capital, Fika Ventures, GD1 and Icehouse Ventures.
Demand has grown for services that automate the grunt work that many law firms do for large corporations, feeding investor interest in the sector. Legal AI startup Harvey was valued at $8 billion last year in a $160 million fundraise.
Ivo, whose customers include Uber, Shopify, IBM, Reddit and Canva, allows businesses to speed up the process of reviewing contracts. The company said its revenue has jumped sixfold since its last funding round in February last year.
The AI startup also helps businesses unlock insights from legacy deals, showing how their negotiating position and risk profile have shifted, CEO and co-founder Min-Kyu Jung told Reuters.
"Increasingly, the trend has been for more complex agreements," Jung said, noting demand has shifted from large-volume, simple contracts to more complicated work.
Still, some high-profile legal errors involving AI-generated fake citations have, in recent years, exposed the dangers of relying on technology prone to hallucination.
In 2024, a judge in Virginia ordered lawyers in a lawsuit to explain why they should not be sanctioned for submitting a filing that he said appeared to include "fictitious cases".
Jung said Ivo achieves high accuracy by breaking reviews into over 400 separate AI tasks instead of just one, a detailed method he said beats both standard chatbots.
The San Francisco-headquartered company plans to use the new funds to triple its current headcount of 60 by the end of 2026.
(Reporting by Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore)
((Aditya.Soni@thomsonreuters.com;))