Luminance closes Series B at $100m to expand legal AI
Cambridge-based legal AI technology business Luminance has raised a fresh $10 million from existing investors Invoke Capital, Talis Capital and Slaughter and May to wrap up a $100m Series B round.
The funds will be used to support the Cambridge University spin-out’s recent product expansion and global growth. The UK company’s machine learning technology is now deployed in over 130 organisations on six continents following its September 2016 launch.
The announcement follows the business’ recent opening of a fifth office in New York to support global growth, adding to bases in London, Cambridge, Chicago and Singapore. The company now has four offerings and over 70 employees.
Whether used for legal due diligence, compliance reviews or eDiscovery, Luminance’s technology operates on advanced pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms that behave much like the human brain, sorting through high-volume documentation and flagging anomalies at speed, offering lawyers greater control and insight into their documents.
In just two years, the company’s technology has been deployed in over 40 countries and is used by thousands of lawyers on a daily basis. In 2018 alone, Luminance’s customer base increased by over 150 per cent, with global employee headcount more than doubling to meet this demand.
CEO Emily Foges said: “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.”
Luminance’s decision to open a New York office came as its US customer base continued to expand – now including Global Top 100 firms McDermott Will & Emery and Holland & Knight, among others.
The company was founded by a group of mathematicians and software engineers from the University of Cambridge following years of research into pattern recognition and machine intelligence.