Generic AI has improved interpretation of dense texts, and this advance has proven to be a boon for startups with one of the most complex texts: law. It makes sense that last year or so, new activity is being seen in the legal technology space behind AI advances.
Legal high-tech startup Udia bagged $105 million last week alone. London-based Genie AI raised 16 million euros last year. US-based Harvey landed a $300 million round led by Sequoia. And Lawhive raised $40 million to chase after a US lawyer on “Main Street.” The most recent addition to that list is brightness, which itself claims “judicial” AI.
Claiming that legal issues and contracts are possible, the brightness raised $75 million in the Series C funding round led by Point 72 Private Investment. The round is worth noting as it raises the largest capital by purely play legal AI companies in the UK and Europe. The company says it has raised more than $115 million in the last 12 months, totaling $165 million.
Luminance was originally developed by Cambridge-based scholar Adam Guthrie (founder and chief technical architect) and Dr. Graham Sills (founder and director of AI). The seeds were funded last year by the late Dr. Mike Lynch, founder of the Autonomous Government who died in a tragic accident.
Brightness uses what is called the “Panel of Jury” AI system to automate and augment the business’s approach to contracts, including generations, negotiations, and post-liberation analysis. The startup will use its own large-scale language model (LLM) to enhance its main product, Lumi Go. This allows customers to send draft contracts to counterparties and represent AI Auto Negotiate.
Rather than using GPT (pre-trained generators), Luminance is a LPT (legal-trained transformer) trained on over 150 million verified legal documents. Use what you’re going to describe. While many of these documents have not been published, the company says it makes its platform relatively defensible. Other legal technology startups tend to build on existing general purpose LLMs.
“It’s a domain-specific AI built with lawyers in mind. […] “The startup’s CEO is Eleanor Lightbody, who took over the founder after the Series A round,” said:
Lightbody explained that the platform was built with the understanding that each model excels at different things. “What you want is to have a mixed model approach where models can check each other’s ‘homework’. And you get the most accurate and transparent answers,” she said.
She argued that this approach is different from competition as clients can use the platform throughout the contract lifecycle.
Luminance currently has over 700 clients in over 70 countries, including names such as AMD, Hitachi, LG Chem, SiriusXM, Rolls-Royce, Lamborghini and more. After opening three offices in San Francisco, Dallas and Toronto and expanding its US headquarters in New York, its personnel tripled in North America.
Series C also saw participation from Forestay Capital, RPS Ventures, Schroders Capital, and existing investors March Capital, National Grid Partners, and Slaughter and May.
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