Ivo Blueprints: How Ivo Built AI That Lawyers Actually Use

Costanoa’s BuilderOps Blueprints help early-stage startups build successful foundations. Through this series, Costanoa's BuilderOps team interviews founders and startup leaders, sharing their learnings to help others build their companies faster and better. Costanoa is an early-stage VC firm backing company builders across Applied AI, AI Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, National Security, and Fintech.

It was our pleasure to chat with Min-Kyu Jung, Co-Founder and CEO of Ivo, for this BuilderOps Blueprints. Ivo is the trusted AI layer that helps enterprise legal teams review, manage, and understand contracts faster and more consistently than ever before. The team just raised an incredible $55M Series B, led by Blackbird, along with Costanoa, Uncork Capital, Fika Ventures, GD1, and Icehouse Ventures. Under the leadership of Min-Kyu as well as CTO and fellow co-founder Jacob Duligall, Ivo has quickly grown their client list to some of the biggest names in tech, including Uber, IBM, Atlassian, Canva, Reddit, Pinterest, Quora, Shopify, and many more. Ivo is actively hiring across a range of roles, responsibilities and levels.

Congrats on your $55M Series B! That’s tremendous—what’s on the docket (see what we did there!)?

We’re hiring across a number of functions: first, we’re excited to invest more in R&D, including on building out a research function. Second, we’re adding more infrastructure to support our growing customer base; that includes people in customer success, professional services, solutions engineering, and so on. Third, we’re opening New York and London offices with the goal of expanding into the European market.

We imagine you have some plans for the product as well?

We’re adding more features every week; we’re particularly excited about the potential to generate proactive recommendations based on previously negotiated agreements.

Say a little more about those tools. What do they do now?

Our Intelligence capability is about total contract visibility. We want you to see and understand everything about your agreements. That means extracting intelligence from existing agreements, flagging risks and deviations from standard positions, and uncovering contract relationships such as amendments, superseding agreements, and so on.

Our Review product cuts contract review and redlining time by 75%. We take in a rich set of context from the customer to inform our reviews; most AI systems are like a smart junior lawyer who joined your company 5 minutes ago and has amnesia. In contrast, Ivo understands your playbooks, your preferred and alternative negotiating positions, commonly used clause language, and previously negotiated agreements. It uses this context to deliver customized outputs.

As an attorney by training, you have some natural empathy for your customers—but you’ve also invested deeply in knowing them. How?

I spend a lot of time with our users. This is the most straightforward and important way to understand them.

We scale this beyond just myself; for example, we try to reduce layers between the people building the products and the people whose problems we’re trying to solve as much as possible. Our engineers and designers are often on calls with our users, literally watching them share their screen and struggle with some part of their workflow.

That said, you would not describe Ivo as a legal tech company—you’ve branched into supporting sales, procurement, and more. Share some perspective on that.

We believe that contracts are business documents first and legal documents second. If you accept this as a starting point, it implies that contracting software can be useful across every department that needs to interact with a contract. This turns out to be more than just legal.

Many enterprise-focused startups would look at your client portfolio with some envy. What are some ways you recommend approaching Fortune 500s to a first-time founder?

Enterprise sales is all about trust. The champion on the customer side needs to believe that you won’t put them out of a job for recommending your service. Big companies have trust by default - Salesforce is so well known and established that people assume they can rely on them.

When you’re a startup, the only way to make up for this is to have a willingness to repeatedly go above and beyond in extreme ways. For example, it’s exceedingly rare for large companies to actually act on feedback from a prospect - if you can demonstrate your ability and willingness to do this repeatedly over several months, you start giving them a reason to trust you above and beyond the established name brand vendor you’re competing against.

You’re originally a solicitor from New Zealand and now you’re here, Series B in hand, a great and growing client portfolio. What was your path?

It was hard not to spend time in a law firm and not notice the endless low-hanging fruit opportunities to improve the way work was being done. I felt a strong compulsion to do something about this.  Around the same time, I remember coming across a Paul Graham tweet where he claimed that any reasonably smart and determined person could learn enough coding skills in six months to start a startup.

That led me to starting Ivo and eventually moving to San Francisco. Part of the reason for moving was that I couldn’t bear the thought of not having a front-row seat to see perhaps the greatest technological shift of our lifetimes play out in real time.