Contract review platform LegalOn bags $50m to fuel UK expansion

Legal AI company LegalOn has raised $50 million in Series E funding, the latest sign of continued investor appetite for AI-powered tools aimed at the legal industry.

The round, led by Goldman Sachs’ growth equity arm, brings LegalOn’s total funding to $200 million and comes as the San Francisco- and Tokyo-headquartered company accelerates its push in the US and UK, where it says business has quadrupled over the past year.

LegalOn primarily targets in-house teams. Its flagship product is a contract review tool to help lawyers flag and fix risks using AI trained on lawyer-developed playbooks. The company says it now supports more than 7,000 customers globally, including 25% of Japan’s public companies and 87% of its Fortune 500.

AI buildout and OpenAI tie-up

The new money will fund LegalOn’s next generation of agentic AI tools, designed to streamline contracting and matter management end-to-end.

In a move that shares similarities with market frontrunners like Harvey, LegalOn also revealed a new tech partnership with OpenAI, giving it access to the latest models. The two companies are jointly working on the development of legal AI agents.

"Legal teams are buried in time-consuming work that slows them and their businesses down", said Daniel Lewis, LegalOn’s global CEO and a former product lead at LexisNexis. "This funding helps us scale AI that eliminates tedious contracting work."

Bigger picture

In the UK, LegalOn faces competition from homegrown players like Robin AI, Juro and Wordsmith - all offering AI-powered contract review tools for in-house teams.

The raise comes amid a surge in legal tech investment. In June, Harvey pulled in $300 million at a $5 billion valuation, while UK-founded competitors like Wordsmith and Definely have also landed multi-million dollar rounds in recent months.

Earlier in July, meanwhile, practice management software giant Clio bought legal content provider vLex in a $1 billion deal that's widely expected to shake-up the market for vendors targeting large law firms.