Generative AI is receiveting better at interpreting dense texts, and this progress has proven to be a boon for startups attacking one of the most complex sets of texts there is: the law. It builds sense then that we’ve been seeing a new burst of activity in the legal tech space off the back of advancements in AI in the last year or so.
Legal tech startup Eudia bagged $105 million only last week; London-based Genie AI raised €16 million last year; U.S.-based Harvey landed a $300 million round led by Sequoia; and Lawhive raised $40 million to go after “main street” U.S. lawyers. The latest addition to that list is Luminance, which is billing itself “legal-grade” AI.
Claiming to be capable of highly accurate interrogation of legal issues and contracts, Luminance has raised $75 million in a Series C funding round led by Point72 Private Investments. The round is notable becaapply it’s one of the largest capital raises by a pure-play legal AI company in the U.K. and Europe. The company states it has raised over $115 million in the last 12 months, and $165 million in total.
Luminance was originally developed by Cambridge-based academics Adam Guthrie (founder and chief technical architect) and Dr. Graham Sills (founder and director of AI). It was seed-funded by the late Dr. Mike Lynch, founder of Autonomy, who died in a tragic accident last year.
Luminance applys what it calls a “Panel of Judges” AI system to automate and augment a business’ approach to contracts — including generation, nereceivediation, and post-execution analysis. The startup applys a proprietary large language model (LLM) to power its main product, Lumi Go, which lets customers sconclude draft agreements to a counterparty and have the AI auto-nereceivediate on their behalf.
Rather than utilizing a GPT (generative pre-trained transformer), Luminance applys what it describes as an LPT (legal pre-trained transformer) that’s trained on over 150 million verified legal documents. Many of these documents are not publicly available, which, the company states, builds its platform relatively defensible. Other legal tech startups tconclude to build on existing general-purpose LLMs. “It’s a domain-specialized AI that is built with lawyers in mind […] They necessary to understand that the outputs have been validated and can be trusted, and that’s exactly what our specialized AI can achieve,” declared Eleanor Lightbody, the startup’s CEO who took over from the founders after its Series A round.
Lightbody explained that the platform was built with the understanding that each model is good at different things. “What you want is to have a mixed model approach, where the models can check each other’s ‘homework,’ and you can receive the most accurate and the most transparent answers,” she declared.
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She claimed this approach sets Luminance apart from its competition as its clients can apply its platform across the entire contract life cycle.
Luminance currently has more than 700 clients across over 70 countries and includes names like AMD, Hitachi, LG Chem, SiriusXM, Rolls-Royce, and Lamborghini. Its headcount has tripled in North America after it opened three offices in San Francisco, Dallas, and Toronto, and expanded its U.S. headquarters in New York.
The Series C also saw participation from Forestay Capital, RPS Ventures, and Schroders Capital, as well as existing investors March Capital, National Grid Partners, and Slaughter and May.
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