US-led $75m Series C takes Luminance haul to $115m in a year

The oversubscribed round was led by Point72 Private Investments, which is primarily based in New York, Seattle, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

Other backers were Forestay Capital, RPS Ventures and Schroders Capital, as well as existing investors including March Capital, National Grid Partners and Slaughter and May.

The investors are all, literally, good ‘judges.’ Developed by AI experts from the University of Cambridge, Luminance uses specialist AI – known as the ‘Panel of Judges’ – to automate and augment every touchpoint a business has with its contracts, from generation to negotiation and post-execution analysis.

The company works with over 700 organisations in 70+ countries across all verticals and has a roster of blue-chip clients such as AMD, Hitachi, LG Chem, SiriusXM, Rolls-Royce and Lamborghini.

Demand for legal AI has grown dramatically. In its core Corporate product offering, Luminance has seen customers increase five times and ARR grow six times in the past two years.

To meet this rapid increase in global demand, Luminance grew headcount by 80 per cent in 2024, most notably in North America where headcount tripled with the opening of three new offices in San Francisco, Dallas and Toronto, and the company expanded its US HQ in New York.

Driving this commercial success, Luminance has pioneered a number of world-firsts in AI. Most recently, the company released Lumi Go, a revolution in contract negotiation that enables Luminance customers to send draft agreements to a counterparty and have the AI auto-negotiate on their behalf.

Eleanor Lightbody, CEO of Luminance, said: “This funding is all about innovation, expansion and scaling. It supercharges our US growth, where 40 per cent 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, said: “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.”

As previously reported, Luminance took the entire top floor at Fora’s space in 20 Station Road at the end of January to expand its R & D team. The company was named AI Innovation category winner at the 2024 Business Weekly Awards last September.