Ivo was founded in Auckland in 2021 by Min-Kyu Jung, an ex-Bell Gully solicitor, and Jacob Duligall, an ex-Xero engineer.
The origin
Jung got sick of manually reviewing contracts as a corporate lawyer. He quit, taught himself to code in two months, and built the prototype.
The product
Ivo says it chains 400+ AI model calls per contract review and scores 97% on the CUAD accuracy benchmark, higher than most human annotators.
At Quora, NDA approvals dropped from 4 days to 2, and first pass contract review went from 11 hours to 5 minutes.
The customers
200+ enterprise customers, including Canva, Uber and IBM.
The raise
US$55M at a US$355M valuation, led by Blackbird, with Costanoa participating.
My read
Two Kiwis with no startup background are building one of the most accurate legal AI tools on the planet, from Auckland. The best vertical AI tends to come from people who did the job by hand and hated it. That is exactly this story.