Lawyer turned self-taught coder raises $25.6m to ride AI boom

A lawyer who abandoned the profession to teach himself coding, and now counts Canva and Fonterra as customers, has accelerated the development of his new AI tool.

Ivo is harnessing AI to ease the workload of in-house lawyers.

A lawyer who abandoned the profession to teach himself coding — and now has customers from Canva to Fonterra — has raised $US16m to accelerate the development of his artificial intelligence-powered contract review software.

Ivo — co-founded by Min-Kyu Jung in New Zealand and now based in San Francisco — has completed a Series A funding round with support from Australia’s biggest venture capital fund Blackbird Ventures.

Ivo co-founder and chief executive Min-Kyu Jung.

Mr Jung says Ivo’s software has so far helped legal teams at more than 150 companies, including “several Fortune 500s”.

He said when he was a corporate lawyer contract review was the “most manual and time-consuming tasks”. So, he left his legal career and taught himself code to solve this problem. Ivo’s tool has slashed turnaround times from days to minutes.

“As contract volumes surge, in-house lawyers face mounting pressure to review more agreements than ever before — yet traditional automation tools prioritise speed over accuracy, forcing legal teams to choose between efficiency and reliability,” Mr Jung said.

“Ivo has developed a breakthrough approach to contract review that sets new standards for accuracy. The platform automatically checks agreements against company requirements, generates specific suggestions for resolving discrepancies, and creates compromise language between conflicting clauses.

“Unlike competitors that treat legal review as a simple automation problem, Ivo’s sophisticated AI produces naturalistic redlines that mirror the work of experienced attorneys, maintaining consistent terminology and making minimal necessary changes.”

Ivo’s customers include Canva, Fonterra, Pipedrive, Weightwatchers, Eventbrite, Blue Cross and Blue Shield Kansas City.

Adrie Christiansen, legal operations lead at Quora said review turnaround times for counterparty nondisclosure agreements has been slashed from four days to two.

“First pass turn improved from an average of 11 hours to 5 minutes,” Ms Christensen said.

Geotab’s legal team reported average savings of 45 minutes per contract review — a 75 per cent efficiency gain which allows their lawyers to focus on strategic work.

Lawyers have become some of the earliest adopters of AI. Thomson Reuters — helmed by Australian Steve Hasker — has been jostling for pole position in dominating the AI market for lawyers and professional services. It acquired Casetext — a legal start-up with an AI-powered assistant for law professionals — for $US650m last year.

It is also investing $US100m per year in developing and integrating AI across its product portfolio, including its flagship legal research tool, Westlaw Precision.

Late last, year rich-lister Christian Beck launched AI-powered platform LawConnect to provide Australians with free legal advice.

LawConnect provides people with AI-generated answers to a range of legal queries, from updating wills to family law disputes. A lawyer then verifies those answers and has the option of signing a LawConnect user as a client if they want to take the matter further.

Ivo’s Series A funding round was led by Costanoa Ventures, with participation from Fika Ventures, Uncork Capital, NFDG, Blackbird VC, GD1, and Phase One Ventures.

It brings Ivo’s total funding to $US22.2m, following early backing from Daniel Gross and a $US4.8m seed round led by Fika Ventures and Uncork Capital.