Contract review remains a slow, manual process that strains legal teams, forcing lawyers to sift through dense language, flag risks, and translate legal terms.
In fact, the problem is so prevalent that for the past several years, Tokyo-based LegalOn Technologies has had an open door to that market: its AI contract review software for legal teams is today used by 7,000 organizations across Japan, the U.S. and the U.K., the company claims, and it leads the Japanese market, with 25% of all public companies in the country using its platform.
LegalOn’s AI contract review tool, Review, identifies risks and suggests edits based on playbooks built by lawyers, and each customer’s legal standards. The company claims Review cuts review times by up to 85% while improving quality and accuracy.
Success hasn’t tempered LegalOn’s ambitions, however. The company now wants to further build out AI agent tools to go along with its software, and recently raised $50 million to do just that.
The Series C funding round is being led by Goldman Sachs’ growth equity fund, and saw participation from existing investor World Innovation Lab (WiL). New investors Mori Hamada & Matsumoto (a law firm in Japan), Mizuho Bank, and Shoko Chukin Bank also invested.
While a lot of the new cash is being dedicated to developing more AI agent products, the company is also enhancing its go-to-market efforts in the U.S. and U.K., where it says its business has quadrupled over the past year.
LegalOn declined to disclose its valuation.
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Founded by two former corporate lawyers, Nozomu Tsunoda and Masataka Ogasawara in 2017, LegalOn aims to address time-consuming tasks before and after the contract review process, such as organizing legal requests and automating contract management.
According to Daniel Lewis, Global CEO of LegalOn, the company stands out from the hordes of legal tech startups using AI thanks to its foundation in attorney-drafted, expert legal content. That base, he says, makes LegalOn unlike other tools that rely on users to build rules from scratch, or use generic AI models that lack the precision required for legal work.
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