Luminance Raises $75 Million for ‘Panel of Judges’ Legal AI Offering

Artificial intelligence (AI) firm Luminance has raised $75 million to scale its legal-industry-focused technology.

“This funding is all about innovation, expansion and scaling,” Eleanor Lightbody, CEO of the U.K.-based Luminance, said in a news release Tuesday (Feb. 18).

“It supercharges our U.S. growth, where 40% of our revenue is already generated, and will fuel key hires and new offices across the U.S., 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.”

The funding round follows the $40 million Luminance raised in a Series B last spring. Developed by University of Cambridge AI experts, Luminance uses specialist AI — known as the “Panel of Judges” — to automate and augment each touchpoint a business has with its contracts, “from generation to negotiation and post-execution analysis,” the release added.

The company works with more than 700 organizations in 70-plus countries, with clients that include AMD, Hitachi, LG Chem, SiriusXM, Rolls-Royce and Lamborghini.

Luminance expanded headcount by 80% in 2024, opening offices in San Francisco, Dallas and Toronto, and expanding its U.S. headquarters in New York.

“Driving this commercial success, Luminance has pioneered a number of world-firsts in AI,” the company said. “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.”

PYMNTS explored the power of generative AI to transform what had typically been manual legal processes last year in a conversation with James Clough, chief technology officer and co-founder of Robin AI.

“Most legal teams, when they’re doing work, what is the output of their work?” Clough said. “It’s not just a prediction, it’s generated text. They want to get something written as an output that they can send to somebody else in an email, or that they can use to add a comment or an edit to a document, or to answer somebody’s question.”

As noted here at the time, legal work requires attention to detail, extensive research and nuanced argumentation, intellectually demanding and time-consuming tasks. It’s part of the reason why — per PYMNTS Intelligence research — 72% of lawyers say they have doubts about whether their field is ready for generative AI.