Luminance on the march in US with $40m growth capital

Off the back of 5x ARR growth in the last two years, the funding will be used to propel Luminance’s global growth plans and expand its US footprint as it continues to drive innovation in the legal AI market.

Santa Monica-based growth-stage venture firm, March Capital was joined in the Series B round by National Grid Partners and other existing investors, including Slaughter and May.

Luminance’s specialist legal Large Language Model (LLM) automates the generation, negotiation and analysis of contracts and other legal documents for a rapidly growing customer base spanning 600 organisations in 70 countries, from global manufacturers such as Koch Industries, Hitachi and Yokogawa, to insurers including Liberty Mutual, as well as pharmaceutical giants such as LG Chem.

Its technology has been used in a number of world-firsts for AI. At the back end of 2023, during a live demonstration to the BBC, Luminance became the first AI in the world to completely automate the negotiation of a contract, without human intervention, between two opposing parties. Luminance was also the first use of AI at London’s highest criminal court, the Old Bailey, where it allowed counsel to cut the time spent reviewing evidence by four weeks.

Luminance CEO, Eleanor Lightbody, said: “This latest round of funding will help us to bring our technology to new markets, strengthen our foothold in the United States where Luminance now generates over one third of its revenue, and solidify our position as the clear market leader in this space.

“The past 12 months have seen huge technical achievements from our Cambridge R & D hub. Developments such as ‘Auto Mark-Up’, which brings agreements into line with gold standards in a click, and AI-powered tools for non-legal teams to independently negotiate contracts, make Luminance the most advanced legal LLM available today.”

Hyun Koo, Partner at March Capital, added: “We invest in AI-native companies solving large, mission critical problems. Given the inefficiencies and complexity that exist today in legal workflows, we immediately saw the potential for Luminance to drive efficiency with its industry leading LLM.

“Luminance’s breadth of enterprise customers speaks to its capabilities, and we are thrilled to partner with their highly technical and growth-minded team to help build a successful, leading and global legal AI company.”

Ian Cooper, Managing Director at National Grid Partners, said: “The power and utilities sector, as a regulated industry, deals with a vast amount of legal and contractual documentation.

“Luminance's innovative legal LLM and advanced AI assistant shows great promise in being able to relieve contract processing bottlenecks and enhance contract performance monitoring. We're optimistic that Luminance's platform will be a valuable tool for power and utilities customers.”