AI Startups: Luminance Launches AI Contract Negotiator; Halliday Aims to End Smart Contracts

Luminance, a legal contracts artificial intelligence (AI) startup, has launched Lumi Go, an AI agent that lets users send draft agreements to counterparties and auto-negotiate on their behalf.

The startup, founded by AI experts from the University of Cambridge, uses AI to understand and analyze legal contracts. Its AI model was trained on a legal large language model; it is being used by a quarter of the world’s largest law firms and Fortune 500 companies.

Luminance said it has seen a five-fold increase in customers and six-fold annual recurring revenue growth over the past two years.

The startup has raised $75 million in Series C funding, bringing their 12-month total to over $115 million, the company said in a February news release.

The oversubscribed round was led by Point72 Private Investments, with participation from Forestay Capital, RPS Ventures, Schroders Capital, and existing investors including March Capital, National Grid Partners and Slaughter and May, per the release.

Luminance plans to use the funding to accelerate U.S. expansion — where 40% of revenue is generated — make key hires and open new offices across the U.S., APAC and Europe. The investment will also fuel innovation at their Cambridge, U.K. R&D hub as they extend their AI platform to use cases in procurement and compliance.

Read more: Flex Raises $225 Million for Finance Platform for Business Owners

Solving the GenAI IP Problem

One of the biggest sticking points about generative AI is the complaint from artists that AI models are trained on their copyrighted works without compensation. Bria aims to solve this problem.

The Israeli startup offers GenAI models such as text-to-image generators that are trained on only licensed data, which it has surrounded with guardrails to ensure that it generates content legally.

Moreover, Bria’s patented attribution engine ensures data owners are compensated based on their influence on the generated outputs.

Bria has raised $40 million in Series B funding, bringing its total raised capital to $65 million, the company said Thursday (March 13). Red Dot Capital led the round with participation from Maor Investment, Entrée Capital, GFT Ventures, Intel Capital and In-Venture.

The funds will be used to scale its platform and expand its attribution technology beyond images to include music, video and text generation. Bria has partnerships with over 30 data providers including Getty Images and Envato, and collaborates with tech giants like Nvidia, Microsoft and AWS.

See also: Reflection AI Raises $130 Million to Build Autonomous Coding Systems

Blockchain Startup to Enable AI Agents

Halliday has raised $20 million in a Series A round, led by a16z crypto with participation from SV Angel, Credibly Neutral and Blizzard Fund, according to a company post on X.

The startup believes blockchain needs to embrace AI to stay competitive, but it has grown into a hodgepodge of various applications and services. It takes a huge effort by developers to connect to various protocols and support different blockchains, according to the startup.

Halliday said its platform makes it easier to build AI-powered blockchain applications safely.

It developed the “Agentic Workflow Protocol,” which can work across multiple blockchains, handle connections to existing protocols and include built-in guardrails to let AI agents interact with blockchain assets safely.

Instead of writing custom smart contracts for each new use case, Halliday’s protocol handles protocol integration, composition and automation. This means developers don’t need to write custom smart contracts each time they wish to engage with a blockchain protocol or service.

The protocol also provides a platform with immutable guardrails that enables AI agents to do work for users safely, the startup said.

Halliday claims it can build applications in hours that would previously take years. It has already used this technology with partners such as Avalanche, DeFi Kingdoms and Frax. A product based on its protocol is Halliday Payments, which enables cross-blockchain payment capabilities.