Robert Ambrogi Blog
The UK company Luminance, an artificial intelligence platform for contract review, today announced that it has completed a Series B funding round of $10 million, at a valuation of $100 million.
The funding was raised from existing investors Invoke Capital, Talis Capital and Slaughter and May. The funds will be used to support product expansion and global growth, the company says. The company closed a $10 million Series A funding in November 2017.
Launched in 2016, Luminance offers a document review platform for due diligence, compliance review, property lease abstraction and e-discovery early case assessment. Its technology is based on machine learning and pattern recognition techniques developed at the University of Cambridge to read and understand legal language.
The company says its platform is used by more than 130 law firms and in-house teams in more than 40 countries, including 14 of the global top 100 firms and three of the big four accounting firms. The company has offices in London, Cambridge, Chicago and Singapore, and recently opened a fifth office in New York.
In a statement announcing the financing, Emily Foges, Luminance CEO, said that 2018 was a year of significant achievement for Luminance. “We have expanded from one product to four, owing to the flexibility and innovative nature of our core technology. This has enabled a remarkable rate of global customer acquisition over the last 12 months and these funds will valuably support this continued expansion.”
Just the Beginning
During the recent Legalweek in New York, I met with Foges, who told me that she expects 2019 to be a year of significant growth for AI, as law firms no longer view it as experimental.
CEO Emily Foges
“Two thousand nineteen will be the year that most law firms move out of their experimental stage,” Foges told me. “What we’re seeing now is firms saying, ‘Now we get it.'”
During our meeting, Foges recounted the platform’s progression from a due diligence platform into compliance review, property lease abstraction and e-discovery.
But her longer-term vision is for Luminance to become “the AI platform for the legal profession,” she said. She wants to extend the life cycle of how legal professionals use the platform, so that as they move from one task to another, they are able to continue working within Luminance.
“I think we’re really just scratching the surface,” Foges said. “Our customers are now doing a lot of their work in a fraction of the time it once took, and doing work that they wouldn’t have pitched for before.”
“This is just the beginning,” Foges said. “It will get even more interesting.”