Min-Kyu Jung, CEO and Co-Founder of Ivo – Interview Series

Min-Kyu Jung, CEO and Co-Founder of Ivo, is a legal technology entrepreneur who transitioned from corporate law into building one of the fastest-growing AI companies in the legal sector. After beginning his career at Bell Gully in New Zealand, where he worked on mergers, acquisitions, and capital markets transactions, Jung became frustrated with the time-consuming and repetitive nature of contract review. In 2021, he co-founded Ivo to modernize legal workflows through artificial intelligence. Now based in San Francisco, he has led the company from startup to industry leader, serving major enterprise customers including Meta, Uber, IBM, Shopify, Canva, Atlassian, Reddit, Pinterest, and DoorDash. His achievements have earned him recognition on the University of Auckland’s 40 Under 40 list and Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia, while helping establish Ivo as a leading force in AI-powered contract intelligence.

Ivo is an AI-powered contract intelligence platform designed to help in-house legal teams review, negotiate, manage, and extract insights from contracts more efficiently. The platform enables legal professionals to draft, redline, explain, and analyze agreements using natural language prompts directly within familiar workflows such as Microsoft Word. Beyond contract review, Ivo provides contract intelligence capabilities that help organizations uncover negotiation patterns, assess risk, and generate strategic business insights across large contract repositories. Trusted by Fortune 500 companies and high-growth technology firms alike, the company has experienced rapid expansion, recently raising $55 million in Series B funding as demand for enterprise legal AI continues to accelerate. Ivo’s focus on accuracy, security, and enterprise-grade compliance has positioned it as one of the leading AI solutions for corporate legal departments seeking to automate complex contracting processes while maintaining rigorous governance standards.

You began your career in law at Bell Gully in Auckland before founding Ivo and eventually building the company from New Zealand roots into a San Francisco-based legal AI platform. What problem in contract work felt so broken that you decided it needed a company built around it?

When I was practicing as a corporate lawyer, contract review was one of the most manual and repetitive parts of the job. Every agreement required careful review, but much of the work involved spotting the same issues, comparing against playbooks, and making largely predictable edits. It was time-consuming, expensive, and often became a bottleneck for the business.

I often thought contract review could be automated, but at the time, the technology wasn’t accurate enough. As large language models improved, reviewing documents became one of the first legal workflows where AI could deliver value. We started Ivo because we believed legal teams ought to spend their time on strategic work rather than reading documents.

Ivo is now working with major enterprise customers such as Uber, IBM, Shopify, Canva, Atlassian, Reddit, Pinterest, and CDW. What has changed most in how large companies think about AI-assisted contract review and contract intelligence compared with even two years ago?

Two years ago, most legal teams viewed AI as something interesting to experiment with. Today, it’s an important part of the legal workflow.

Legal departments are under pressure to move faster while managing growing workloads, and they’re looking for technology that can help them keep pace with the business without sacrificing accuracy. The conversation has shifted from “What can AI do for me?” to “How much value can I get out of my AI investment?”

AI’s capabilities are advancing quickly, and the use cases for legal teams have expanded accordingly. Enterprises that started with AI-powered contract review to save time are now using AI to turn their entire contract libraries into sources of business intelligence: detecting patterns in their own history to map risk exposure, strengthening negotiating positions, and spotting opportunities that would otherwise stay invisible.

Our most recent release takes that further. Connect Ivo Review to your negotiating history, and every lawyer on your team can see how often your organization agrees to specific provisions and whether to accept what a counterparty is offering based on your own precedents. It’s institutional memory, made available to everyone.

The question used to be whether AI belonged in legal. Now it’s which platform you’re building your legal operations on. For a growing number of the world’s largest companies, that’s Ivo.

Contract review is a high-stakes workflow where accuracy, risk, and context matter. How does Ivo approach legal AI differently from a general-purpose chatbot or document assistant?

General-purpose AI is built for breadth. Legal work demands something different.

We saw that difference clearly when we tested Ivo against a general-purpose AI tool on 19 real contracts, with senior lawyers judging the output. Ivo scored higher in every category. The gap was most pronounced in surgical accuracy and legal judgment.

That result reflects a deliberate design choice. A contract isn’t just text; it’s a set of business decisions, risk tolerances, and negotiated positions. Legal teams need outputs that are accurate, explainable, and aligned with company-specific policies. Ivo analyzes contracts while considering your organization’s own history, against legal playbooks, and specific deal context—exactly the same way a human lawyer would.

Many enterprises are interested in AI, but legal teams often move carefully because of confidentiality, hallucinations, and compliance concerns. What objections do you still hear from general counsel, and how do you address them?

Trust remains the biggest consideration. Legal teams are responsible for managing significant business risk, so they need confidence that any AI system will protect confidential information and produce reliable outputs.

Ivo is built to minimize hallucinations. In addition, its reasoning is transparent and easy to find; you can see why it draws its conclusions, and you can provide feedback to improve it.

Ivo has reportedly grown ARR 6x over the last year. What do you think is driving that acceleration: better AI models, stronger enterprise readiness, pressure on legal teams to move faster, or a combination of all three?

All three—and they reinforce each other. Legal teams are under real pressure with growing workloads and lean resources. AI models have gotten good enough to handle high-stakes work reliably, and enterprises are finally ready to deploy at scale. That tailwind is real.

But tailwinds don’t explain why Ivo specifically is growing the way it is. A big part of it is that we’ve consistently been first to market with what customers actually need—and we stay that way by keeping an unusually close pulse on them. I did hundreds of hours of customer interviews when we launched, and that instinct hasn’t changed.

The most recent example of that is Ivo Intelligence. Contract intelligence is emerging as a category right now, and we’re already leading it. The rest is momentum. The enterprise legal world is small and GCs talk.  Enterprise legal leaders feel confident in our ability to help them with their challenges because they know we’ve done the same for companies like Uber, IBM, Shopify, and Mitsubishi Electric.

Contracts contain enormous amounts of business intelligence, from pricing and obligations to risk exposure and negotiation patterns. How do you see AI changing the way companies use contract data beyond simply speeding up review?

Most organizations think about contracts as documents. We think of them as a rich source of insights.

Contracts contain information about revenue, obligations, supplier relationships, risk exposure, and pricing. All that business intelligence lies buried in millions of pages of legal language. Until recently, most of it stayed there. AI changes that, giving companies the ability to surface and act on that information: measuring risk, spotting opportunities, and making faster decisions.

Carla Michel, the Director, Senior Counsel at CDW, says that Ivo has helped CDW understand on a broader level exactly how they contract with their suppliers—showing frequent sticking points in negotiations, for example. “It’s a way to produce a better result in a shorter period of time,” Carla says.  

Ivo has announced Meta as a new customer while already working with several major global organizations. What does winning customers at that scale require from a product, security, and implementation standpoint?

In competitive deals, Ivo nearly always wins, especially once customers try the platform. We have an 85% head-to-head trial win rate.

We’re also intentional about defining our product beyond the software. We have a team of excellent in-house lawyers—many of whom come from Am Law 100 firms or enterprise legal teams— and their job is to be trusted advisers for our customers at every stage of the AI adoption journey.

They’ve navigated the same challenges our customers have and bring proven solutions for companies at this scale. It’s a real partnership built around helping customers get the most out of AI.

Ivo is partnering with New Zealand Football as the Official Legal AI Partner of the All Whites ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Why was this sponsorship personally and strategically important for the company?

As a New Zealand-founded company, this partnership is meaningful for us because we know what it’s like to build something in Auckland and take it to the world stage. There is a shared mindset around ambition, preparation, and focus that made the partnership feel very natural.

Looking ahead, what do you think the role of in-house lawyers becomes as AI takes over more of the repetitive work involved in reviewing, negotiating, and analyzing contracts?

Lawyers have always spent the majority of their time working with documents. As AI handles more of that manual review work, attorneys can now do what they’re actually good at: judgment, negotiation, risk assessment, and strategic advice. At Ivo, we think about this concretely. Every hour spent on document review is an hour not spent advising the business. As that ratio shifts, legal stops being a cost center and starts functioning as a strategic asset. That’s what we’re here to accelerate.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Ivo.