Why We Invested in Ivo
Today, Ivo announced a new $16m Series A led by Costanoa Ventures. Back in 2023, Fika Ventures had the privilege of leading their Seed Round alongside Uncork Capital. To mark this milestone, we wanted to take a few moments to reflect on their incredible journey to date.
The problem Ivo is solving is not a new one. Contracts have been around since ancient Mesopotamia, and although we are no longer using clay tablets, much of the tedium has remained the same. At its core, a contract is an agreement between two parties, bound by logic and conditions. Along the way, we’ve found better ways to store them (from clay to the cloud) and collaborate around them (via the multiple waves of contract lifecycle management software), yet we haven’t made real strides in how they are reviewed and understood. Today in 2025, contracts are still largely manually interpreted, contested and iterated on by humans.
Enter Ivo, the AI Contract Review platform that is now serving over 150 enterprises — including Canva, Mozilla, Quora, Eventbrite, WordPress and more — helping them cut contract review times by up to 75%.
When we first met Min-Kyu in 2023, the broader legal tech space was already heating up with fierce competition for both mindshare and customers.
But in many ways, Ivo stands as an outlier, defying much of the VC conventional wisdom and widely held beliefs about what it takes to build a successful company:
Belief #1: The moat should be obvious.
VCs want a neat headline or story on differentiation — the “ah-ha” should be obvious in the 10 second elevator pitch. But what makes Ivo differentiated as a product can’t be boiled down to 1–3 big headlines or features — it’s a hundred thoughtful product decisions that sum up to an elegant and polished solution. These small moments of delight and intuitive design show the user that they are seen and heard, and it is this obsession with details over headlines that has allowed Ivo to earn deep customer love and loyalty.
Belief #2: Back an insider.
VCs are always looking for the unfair advantage, whether in distribution (legal industry insider) or access to capital (Silicon Valley insider). And while Min-Kyu’s experience as a corporate lawyer deeply informs his product decisions, he is the consummate outsider in every other way.
He was the outsider at his law firm questioning why things were being done in certain ways. He was an outsider in New Zealand because becoming a “founder” was not a conventional career path, and often misunderstood as a soft euphemism for being unemployed. And when we met him in 2023, he was an outsider to Silicon Valley, having just moved with his cofounder Jacob and their families to the U.S. three months prior, effectively starting from scratch in a brand new ecosystem. But it is this same track record of challenging norms and approaching problems from first principles that has been key to Ivo’s success.
Belief #3: Competition is bad.
A VC’s biggest fear is a market that is too noisy or competitive, and AI legal tech was (and still is) one of the noisiest. Competition means a race to the bottom on pricing as startups undercut each other on price to win deals. And indeed, almost *every* deal that Ivo walks into is competitive (sometimes up to 15 vendors).
But the counterintuitive insight is that competition is also a signal for how important a workflow is, and the depth of the pain point it is solving. The fact that a buyer is willing to take the time to run a lengthy 15 vendor evaluation means they are genuinely looking for the best product, not the cheapest. Ivo’s tremendous win rates in these high-stakes bakeoffs speaks to the level of depth and polish of their platform.
It’s been an incredible privilege partnering with and watching Ivo defy classic VC logic in building a best-in-class product and company. And we also couldn’t be more excited to welcome our friend Amy Cheetham, and the entire Costanoa Ventures team in building this next chapter of Ivo.
Congrats to Min-Kyu and the Ivo team!
PS, I sat down with Min-Kyu to get his thoughts on his journey thus far — we talk about his move from New Zealand to the US, defensibility in AI, and much more. Listen here.
