Ivo’s Big Bet on Smarter Legal Work—and Why We’re On Board

Legal teams are drowning in contracts – reviewing them, comparing them, and negotiating them. While technology has transformed so many business operations, in-house legal departments still struggle with outdated tools that make contract management painful and inefficient. That’s why we’re excited to announce our investment in Ivo, which is fundamentally reimagining how legal teams work with contracts.

Over the last 15+ years, there has been a massive increase in the number of lawyers working in-house, reflecting a fundamental change in how companies approach legal operations. But despite the increase in headcount, legal teams face ongoing pressure to do more with less. They’re expected to handle increasingly intricate contracts, within an expanding and increasingly complex regulatory landscape, and drive business value – all while keeping costs down.

Timing is everything and we believe the time is right for Ivo. Their platform helps in-house legal teams reduce the time, effort, and cost of negotiating contracts. The contract lifecycle management (CLM) market isn’t new, but current solutions fall remarkably short. Even market leaders like IronClad haven’t solved the fundamental problem: legal teams need truly searchable contract management, which hasn’t existed – until now.

To manage costs, companies are increasingly reducing their reliance on outside law firms and doing more in-house. But, without the right tools, this only adds to the already significant pressure on in-house teams. They need better tools, not just more hours in the day.

The Ivo team’s deep experience and deep understanding of these challenges immediately stood out when I met them. The CEO and founder, Min-Kyu experienced the frustrations of a corporate law firm firsthand, so from the beginning the Ivo team wasn’t just building another point solution – they were on a mission to fundamentally change how legal teams work.

This isn’t just about basic search or storing contracts. Ivo’s unique approach combines sophisticated redlining capabilities within a broader CLM platform, creating a true system of record that actually works the way legal teams do. Their rapid growth and enthusiastic customer base prove they’ve struck a chord.

The timing for Ivo couldn’t be better. Large Language Models (LLMs) have fundamentally changed what’s possible in so many workflows, including contract management. Instead of relying on vector embeddings (data represented as numbers so that machine learning models can process it) that are stored in databases for retrieval, newer AI models are being fine-tuned to retrieve, synthesize, and generate knowledge directly. This technological shift makes truly intelligent contract management possible in ways it simply wasn’t previously.

As a result, Ivo’s search capabilities are both more accurate and significantly faster than other solutions. Their differentiated approach of combining sophisticated redlining tools with a broader CLM platform enables Ivo to become both a source of truth and a workflow platform–a powerful combination.

Ivo stands out in the competitive legal tech sector for their very fast growth and customer love. These stem from the team’s deep understanding of their customers’ needs and clear vision for the category’s future that we hadn’t seen before. Their product isn’t just incrementally better – it’s a fundamental rethinking of how legal teams should work.

For all these reasons, we couldn’t be more excited to partner with Ivo on this journey as they improve contract management on the way to transforming how legal teams operate in the modern era.