Luminance has raised $75m in a Series C funding round, one of the largest capital raises by a pure-play legal AI company in the UK and Europe, according to TechCrunch.

The start-up, which was founded by Cambridge-based academics Adam Guthrie (chief technical architect) and Dr. Graham Sills (director of AI) in 2015, said it had raised more than $115m over the past 12 months. 

The round comes amid a flurry of activity in the legaltech space over the past year fuelled by advancements in AI. Just last week Eudia, which uses AI to help streamline tasks for in-house teams at Fortune 500 companies, said it had closed a Series A funding round of up to $105m and Harvey announced a $300m Series D funding – one of the largest legal tech fundings ever. 

Meantime, last year EvenUp, a legaltech startup serving personal injury law firms, raised $135m in a Series D funding round, Clio raised $900m in a Series F round and London-based Genie AI raised €16m in Series A funding led by Google Ventures. 

Luminance’s latest round was led by Point72 Private Investments, with participation from Forestay Capital, RPS Ventures and Schroders Capital, as well as existing investors including March Capital, National Grid Partners and Slaughter and May.

Luminance said it works with over 700 organisations in more than 70 countries and has a roster of blue-chip clients such as AMD, Hitachi, LG Chem, SiriusXM, Rolls-Royce and Lamborghini.

More than a quarter of the global top 100 law firms use its tech, including White & Case, Clifford Chance and Clyde & Co as well as Slaughters, whose involvement with the start-up goes back to 2016 when it tested and piloted its software. 

Luminance uses what it calls a “Panel of Judges” AI system to automate and augment a business’s handling of its contracts – including generation, negotiation and post-execution analysis. The start-up uses a proprietary large language model (LLM) to power Lumi Go, its new contract negotiation tool that enables customers to send draft agreements to a counterparty and have the AI auto-negotiate on their behalf.

The company said it is differentiated by the use of its own proprietary LLM, which has been trained on more than 150 million verified legal documents – in contrast with other companies in the market that have built their tech on existing general-purpose Gen AI LLMs.

Luminance pointed to dramatic growth in demand for legal AI, saying it had seen customers increase five times and ARR (annual recurring revenue) grow six times in the past two years. To meet this demand the company grew headcount by 80% in 2024, notably in North America where it tripled with the opening of new offices in San Francisco, Dallas and Toronto alongside the expansion of its US headquarters in New York.

Eleanor Lightbody, CEO of Luminance, said the latest funding round was “all about innovation and scaling”.

She added: “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.”