London legal AI firm Luminance secures £32m funding in US expansion push
London-based artificial intelligence (AI) company Luminance has received $40m (£32m) in Series B funding to fuel its expansion efforts in the US.
The funding round is spearheaded by March Capital, a growth-stage venture firm headquartered in Santa Monica, along with participation from National Grid Partners and other existing investors such as Slaughter and May.
With the capital injection, Luminance plans to boost its global presence and strengthen its foothold in the US market, where the company currently generates over one third of its revenue from.
Hyun Koo, partner at March Capital, said: “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.”
AI is shaking up the legal sector, with the number of lawyers using generative AI tools at least once a month more than doubling in half a year, according to a recent survey.
Luminance’s proprietary legal AI model automates the negotiation of contracts and other legal documents to speed up what can often be a lengthy process.
It currently has a customer base spanning 600 organisations in 70 countries, including global manufacturers such as Koch Industries and Hitachi, as well as pharmaceutical giants like LG Chem.
Eleanor Lightbody, chief executive of Luminance, said: “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.”
Founded in Cambridge, Luminance has achieved a fivefold increase in annual recurring revenue over the past two years.
Sally Wokes, partner at Slaughter and May, said: “As an early investor in Luminance, we have always seen the vision for the technology and the business. It is fantastic to see the market validating our belief in the ground-breaking innovation that the company is bringing to the sector.”