Legal artificial intelligence startup backed by Mike Lynch valued at $100m after funding round
Legal artificial intelligence business Luminance has hit a $100m (£77m) valuation with backing from investors that include tech billionaire Mike Lynch.
Luminance said today it had raised $10m in a series B funding round that valued the business at $100m.
Backers include Lynch’s Invoke Capital, Talis Capital and Magic Circle law firm Slaughter and May.
Lynch was charged with fraud by US authorities in November in connection with the $11.7bn sale of the company he founded, Autonomy, to Hewlett Packard in 2011.
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Lynch, who denied all wrongdoing, was charged with 14 counts of conspiracy and fraud with a maximum penalty of 20 year in prison.
Following the charges Lynch resigned from his role as an adviser to the UK government and resigned from the board of cybersecurity start-up Darktrace.
He remains a board member of Luminance, although it is understood he offered to resign and his offer was refused.
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Luminance chief executive Emily Foges said: “Having Mike on our board is invaluable. Nobody has the experience of growing and scaling companies like he does, and we benefit from his insights on a regular basis.”
Luminance offers a document review platform that uses machine learning and pattern recognition techniques developed at the University of Cambridge to read and understand legal language.
Its customers include 14 of the top 100 global law firms and three of the Big Four accountancy firms.
Vanessa Colomar, partner at Invoke Capital, said: “Luminance remains the only true application of machine learning for legal language present in the market today. The company’s success over the past two years is indicative of the fundamentally different solution it is providing to law firms and in-house legal teams and we are pleased to back the business through its next stage of growth.”