Luminance, a startup helping lawyers draw up contracts faster, has raised $75m amid a flurry of funding rounds for European companies helping automate the legal profession.
London-based Luminance automates contract generation and negotiation for enterprises’ legal departments, and began releasing AI agents — which perform tasks without needing human oversight — towards the end of last year.
The Series C was led by Point72 Private Investments, with participation from Forestay Capital, RPS Ventures and Schroders Capital. Existing investors including March Capital, National Grid Partners and law firm Slaughter and May were also involved.
Luminance’s latest round comes less than a year on from a $40m Series B, taking total funding to $165m.
VCs have been scrambling to back startups in the AI legaltech space over the past year, betting on the cost-saving potential of automating whole workflows in a profession full of repetitive processes.
In 2024, investors like Index Ventures, Plural, Episode 1, Google Ventures and General Catalyst all wrote cheques for European legaltechs.
“This funding 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,” says CEO Eleanor Lightbody.
“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.”
Doubling down on AI agents
Founded in 2015, Luminance says it now has over 700 companies using its platform in more than 70 countries, including the likes of chip giant AMD, electronics company Hitachi and carmaker Rolls-Royce.
Alongside expanding to cover other aspects of legal automation, building AI agents is the other big focus for Luminance going into 2025.
The startup began testing its first agents with select enterprises towards the end of last year and hopes to roll them out more widely over the next few months. One of those is an agent that’ll be able to automatically complete tasks on contracts and another will be able to draft and negotiate contracts, Luminance says.
“AI agents will massively drive efficiencies and time saving in automating repetitive tasks,” says Lightbody. “The tech has come really far over the past 12 months.”
Luminance saw its headcount grow 80% to 250 in 2024, including tripling in the US — and will grow by roughly the same amount in 2025, Lightbody says.
“The US has the potential to be our biggest market,” she tells Sifted, adding that the country will likely be generating half Luminance’s revenue very soon.
But it’ll be up against stiff competition from homegrown startups in the country, alongside overseas competitors looking to expand themselves.
Just last week, US AI legaltech Harvey raised $300m at a $3bn valuation. European players like RobinAI, which raised more than $50m across two rounds in 2024, and Genie AI, which picked up $18m in October last year, are both expanding in the US.
That competition will see winners and losers begin emerging over the next couple of years, Lightbody says. “The market is big enough that there’ll be a few winners, but I think you’ll start to see a lot of consolidation in the market as well.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/luminance-ai-agent-raise-news/
