The round is led by Blackbird, which participated in the Series A raise less than a year ago. Costanoa Ventures, Uncork Capital, Fika Ventures, GD1 and Icehouse Ventures also joined the raise.
Contract review startup Ivo, led by two Kiwi founders in their early 30s, has bagged another $82 million to continue its rapid growth. CTO Jacob Duligall and CEO Min-Kyu Jung have relocated to San Francisco, and say it is Ivo’s execution that is its secret sauce.
“We’ve definitely benefited from AI timing, but we’re also seeing extreme competition – we have an 85% head to head trial win rate – so our progress has relied on exceptional execution,” Jung tells Forbes Australia.
Ivo’s clients include Uber, Shopify, IBM, Pinterest, Quora, Reddit, and Canva. In just 12 months, ARR has grown by 500 per cent, and the number of Fortune 500 customers has expanded by 250 per cent. The valuation has multiplied 5x since February last year.
“In-house legal teams demand products that are deeply accurate and aligned to how they work. The most sophisticated teams are incredibly selective about the tools they trust,” says James Palmer, a New Zealand-based partner at Blackbird.
Competitors to Ivo include Juro, Harvey and LegalOn. San Francisco-based Uber says it signed on with Ivo in December 2025 because it delivered on accuracy, confidentiality requirements, could work in multiple languages and was intuitive to use.
From Aetearoa to California
Founder Min-Kyu worked as a lawyer in Auckland before building Ivo. He experienced the problem that the startup is solving firsthand and set out to optimise manual, fragmented contract workflows that he says slow down business, drain legal teams, and introduce risk.
The company states it can maximise contract clarity while also cutting review time by 75 per cent. The series B funds will be used to continue developing the product and scale the company to new clients.
Jung believes he is now doing his life’s work.
“Like many young Kiwis and Australians, I became a lawyer almost by accident; I had an abstract appreciation for the law as an institution, and liked the idea of helping clients be successful, but it mostly happened by default without me thinking too critically about what I wanted to do,” he says.
“In many ways, being a lawyer felt inherently pessimistic; my role was to think through the relatively low-likelihood worst-case scenario and optimise to mitigate that outcome.”
Now, the entrepreneur says he thinks in a much more positive way.
“The overwhelming majority of startups fail, so being a founder requires some degree of delusional optimism – my job is to maximise our odds of outlier success.”
Min-Kyu Jung
Achieving success through entrepreneurialism is something Jung hopes other Antipodeans will also strive for.
“In my experience, Kiwis and Aussies (including myself) have an extreme reluctance to make impositions on others,” he says. “Getting things off the ground requires overcoming incredible inertia, and you need to lose any shyness about repeatedly asking people (including strangers) for help.”
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