Legal AI pioneer Luminance has raised $75 million in a Series C funding round led by Point72 Private Investments, with contributions from Forestay Capital, RPS Ventures, and Schroders Capital. Existing investors, including March Capital, National Grid Partners, and Slaughter and May, also participated. This brings Luminance’s total fundraising over the past year to more than $115 million. The investment highlights the increasing demand for AI-driven solutions in the legal sector.
Managing a sea of contracts in a legal department can be overwhelming, with each needing detailed review and negotiation. Traditionally, this process is laborious and error-prone. Luminance’s AI technology revolutionises these tasks, boosting efficiency and accuracy for legal professionals across the globe.
Pioneering legal AI solutions for contract management
Developed by AI experts from the University of Cambridge, Luminance employs a specialised AI system known as the “Panel of Judges” to automate and enhance all interactions businesses have with their contracts. This encompasses contract generation, negotiation, and post-execution analysis. The company’s innovative approach has attracted over 700 clients across more than 70 countries, including prominent names like AMD, Hitachi, LG Chem, SiriusXM, Rolls-Royce, and Lamborghini.
Rapid legal AI growth and global expansion
In response to the escalating demand for legal AI, Luminance has experienced significant growth. Over the past two years, its core corporate customer base has increased fivefold, with annual recurring revenue growing sixfold. To support this expansion, the company increased its workforce by 80% in 2024, notably tripling its headcount in North America with the opening of new offices in San Francisco, Dallas, and Toronto, alongside an expanded US headquarters in New York.
Founders’ backgrounds and company inspiration
Luminance was founded by AI experts from Cambridge University – Adam Guthrie and Dr. Graham Sills and validated by leading lawyers. The company’s inception was driven by the recognition of the challenges legal professionals face in managing vast amounts of contractual data, inspiring the development of an AI solution to streamline these tasks.
Eleanor Lightbody is the CEO of Luminance, having joined the business in 2021 and elevating it to new heights. Prior to Luminance, she was a country Director at world-leading cyber-AI company, Darktrace, where she founded and grew the company’s operations in Africa before heading up the Industrial Division.
Co-founders Adam Guthrie and Graham Sills met at the University of Cambridge. After hearing from friends working in law about the long nights sifting through piles of documents and data, they knew the legal sector was ripe for AI adoption. After developing an AI algorithm that could read and understand human language, they took the technology to world-renowned law firm, Slaughter and May, who not only became Luminance’s first customer but also chose to invest in the company from day one through to the present day.
Innovations driving the future of legal AI
Luminance continues to lead in AI advancements, recently unveiling Lumi Go, a groundbreaking tool that enables clients to send draft agreements to counterparties and have the AI negotiate on their behalf. This development signifies a major leap forward in automating complex legal processes.
What makes it stand out?
As per the company, Hitachi has saved over 500 hours annually on contract drafting with Luminance, Avianca achieved 90% time-savings by automating contract review, and Yokogawa reduced the time to respond to business queries from 7 days to 5 minutes.
It stands out from the rest as follows:
- Specialised, high-quality data: Generalist AI models rely on a wide range of unverified sources across the internet, which can lead to inconsistent, unsubstantiated results. In contrast, Luminance has been exposed to over 150 million verified legal documents. And with 10 years on the market working with a quarter of the world’s best law firms, as well as world-leading organisations, our AI has been used, trained and validated at the highest level.
- Proprietary legal LLM: A collection of specialised models working together via a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approach – known as the “Panel of Judges” – provides balanced, task-specific precision, ensuring any output is stringently verified by multiple experts.
- Luminance’s Legal-Grade
AI is not just a tool for contract review. It’s the backbone of a comprehensive platform that spans the entire contract lifecycle, from generation and negotiation to post-execution analysis and end-to-end workflow automation. While many solutions on the market address specific pain points, Luminance offers an integrated solution that covers every stage of the contract lifecycle.
Future goals and competitive landscape
Looking ahead, Luminance plans to expand its AI platform into adjacent areas such as procurement and compliance, addressing a broader spectrum of business needs. The company distinguishes itself from competitors through its unique “Panel of Judges” AI system, offering Legal-Grade accuracy and a comprehensive end-to-end platform for contract management.
Eleanor Lightbody, CEO of Luminance, stated: “This funding is all about innovation, expansion and scaling. It supercharges our US growth, where 40% of our revenue is already generated, and will fuel key hires and new offices across the US, APAC and Europe. It also accelerates innovation at our Cambridge R&D hub as we expand Luminance’s AI platform to legal adjacent use cases in procurement and compliance. With Point72 Private Investments’ deep legal tech expertise, we are setting the benchmark for end-to-end, legal-grade AI for enterprise.”
Sri Chandrasekar, Managing Partner of Point72 Private Investments, added: “We know this market well and strongly believe in the power of next-generation AI to revolutionise contracting processes across the enterprise. We are excited to back Luminance as it continues building a specialist and trusted technology that has already been adopted by many of the world’s largest organisations. Their team, strategy and vision positions them well to win this market.”
Hyun Koo, Partner at March Capital and Luminance board member, commented: “Since our initial investment, Luminance has made significant strides growing in key markets and in product development. Recent wins with major customers such as DHL and AMD highlight its product capabilities, quick time-to-value, and clear ROI, which are increasingly important in enterprise AI adoption. We’re excited to continue working with the Luminance team as they solidify their position as the global leader in legal AI.”
Sally Wokes, Partner at Slaughter and May, noted: “We continue to work closely with the Luminance team, and it is exciting to see this latest funding round success. The legal AI market is developing at a rapid rate, and we wish Luminance every success as they continue to harness this demand and pioneer new developments in AI.”
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