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Legal technology firm Luminance has raised $40 million in fresh funding from investors to grow its U.S. footprint, capitalizing on the wave of investor interest surrounding artificial intelligence.

The company told CNBC that it raised the fresh capital in a Series B funding round led by U.S. venture fund March Capital. National Grid Partners, the venture capital arm of the National Grid, and law firm Slaughter and May, also invested in the round.

“We had lots of interest from lots of VCs,” Eleanor Lightbody, CEO of Luminance, told CNBC in an interview on Tuesday.

The fact that AI is now a “hot topic” certainly helped, Lightbody said, but she added that Luminance had the metrics — such as its annual sales performance — to match the interest it’s gotten from investors.

Lightbody said that businesses are investing in AI tools like Luminance’s to keep a competitive edge, as well as to reduce costs.

“Everyone wants to stay competitive,” she told CNBC. “We want to build opportunities they didn’t know existed.”

Luminance said its annual recurring revenue jumped roughly fivefold in the past two years, but declined to share figures with CNBC. The company counts the likes of Koch Industries, Hitachi, Yokogawa, Liberty Mutual, LG Chem, and BBC Studios as its clients.

Legal business

Founded in September 2015, Luminance develops machine learning models that help lawyers automate contract reviews and shorten the time it takes to get them signed. The company was founded by a combination of lawyers, mathematicians, and experts in mergers and acquisitions at the University of Cambridge.

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Luminance is one firm of the many generating buzz from investors thanks to the hype swirling around artificial intelligence. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, and Mistral have raised billions of dollars from venture capitalists — along with interest from large tech firms like Microsoft and Amazon.

Microsoft has invested north of $10 billion into OpenAI, and the firm recently completed a secondary share sale led by Thrive Capital, valuing it at $80 billion.

Luminance declined to comment on its valuation, but Lightbody said that it fetched a “significant premium” over the $100 million assessment that the company secured in 2018, when it last raised external funds.

Investors have been placing bets on sector-specific AI companies lately, sometimes in favor of businesses pursuing a form of “general” AI that would be capable of performing any task imaginable.

In a sector like law, where a high level of attention needs to be paid to a company’s specific legal controls and decision-making, Lightbody said that general-purpose AI solutions like ChatGPT aren’t the answer.

“We’re going to start seeing a lot more specialized AI companies come out,” Lightbody said. “That’s exactly what we’re doing.”

She noted that domain-specific large language models are “absolutely key” in the legal field.

“It’s important because, unlike generative AI, where it doesn’t really matter whether the answer is wrong because the whole point of AI is to come up with an answer, when it comes to legal that just can’t happen.”

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT have become known for producing “hallucinations” — answers that contain false information about certain historical events, in an effort to guess the answer to a user’s question.

Luminance plans to invest aggressively toward expanding its U.S. footprint, in an effort that Lightbody said will include hiring new executives locally, as well as exploring new offices.

Autopilot

Last year, the company launched an artificial intelligence tool capable of negotiating a contract completely autonomously without any human involvement. Luminance says the instrument, dubbed Autopilot, handles day-to-day contracts negotiations, and especially the tedious manual work of reviewing nondisclosure agreements (NDAs).

Luminance developed the AI based on its own proprietary large language model (LLM). LLMs are a type of AI algorithm that can achieve general-purpose language processing and generation.

The business is backed by Invoke Capital, the venture capital arm owned by controversial British entrepreneur Mike Lynch.

Lynch has been accused of artificially inflating the value of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which is suing him for billions of dollars’ worth of alleged losses.

He has been charged by the U.S. Justice Department with 14 counts of wire fraud, one count of securities fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Lynch denies the charges and says that Autonomy underperformed under HPE due to mismanagement from its new owner.

Lightbody said that the U.S. proceedings against Lynch aren’t creating uncertainty for Luminance, and that the businessman has no day-to-day involvement in the running of the company.

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect the spelling of Eleanor Lightbody’s name.

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Apple’s WWDC underwhelms on AI, but software gets biggest facelift in over a decade

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Apple's WWDC underwhelms on AI, but software gets biggest facelift in over a decade

Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 09, 2025 in Cupertino, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Apple‘s annual developer conference on Monday lacked the splashy announcement that fans are used to seeing at WWDC. There was nothing like the Vision Pro reveal from 2023 or the Apple Intelligence announcement last year.

But there was an important software update that, later this year, will change the way all of Apple’s major devices, from iPhones and Mac laptops to Vision Pro virtual reality headsets, will look. It’s a new design language that runs across all of Apple’s operating systems. The company is calling it Liquid Glass.

For Apple, it’s the first significant redesign of its iPhone operating system since 2013, when the company announced iOS7. Apple says the lock screen will look like it’s made out of glass. Buttons will turn into little glass pills, fluidly sliding over glass rails. And there are new animations, including when answering a phone call.

The unveiling underwhelmed Wall Street, which sent the stock down 1.2% on the day. Investors are pressuring Apple to make big changes to its artificial intelligence strategy, pushing it to match the frontier models capabilities of rivals such as Google and OpenAI.

“Many of the AI features announced were more incremental in our view, and already available through competitor applications,” UBS analyst David Vogt wrote in a note on Monday. He has the equivalent of a hold rating on the stock.

Last year, Apple announced Apple Intelligence, its response to ChatGPT, complete with a demo of a “more personal” Siri that could intelligently parse through emails and messages to figure out the best time to make a restaurant reservation. Apple delayed the feature in March, had to pull ads that depicted it, and provided no update on timing on Monday.

“This work needed more time to meet our high quality bar,” Apple software chief Craig Federighi said on Monday. He restated the company’s “the coming year” timeline.

Liquid glass design

Apple’s focus at WWDC was on providing new features and animations across its software that are “delightful,” in CEO Tim Cook’s words.

The new design language is heavy on transparent buttons, sliders, and other interaction elements. Users will be able to spot it as soon as they upgrade their phones to the new iOS, which will be available for beta testing this summer.

Apple announces liquid glass during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 9, 2025 in Cupertino, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Instead of hard, sharp corners in rectangular windows, Apple’s new design language has curved corners that match the device.

One reason Apple gave for rolling out the update now is that its computers and chips have become powerful enough to handle it. Apple said that its new look was directly inspired by the look of VisionOS, the company’s software for Vision Pro.

“Apple Silicon has become dramatically more powerful — enabling software, materials and experiences we once could only dream of,” Federighi said in a recorded video.

As with many Apple announcements, reactions are all over the map. Some people on social media were excited while others compared the update to the look of Windows Vista, which was released in 2007.

While Apple didn’t make many significant changes to the Siri experience, the company did introduce a few significant improvements and changes to its AI capabilities.

Apple also expanded its integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, integrating its image generation capabilities into an app that previously only used Apple’s technology.

When a user takes a screenshot on an iPhone, a new button will send the image to ChatGPT, which can summarize blocks of text in the image, or even decipher what’s happening.

One major improvement Apple is rolling out is in language translation.

During a phone call between two people who don’t speak the same language, the phone app can translate a sentence after it’s spoken and use an AI-generated voice to speak to the other party in the their language. Apple says the feature uses AI processed on the iPhone and doesn’t require a connection to a server.

New numbers

Little information from Apple on Siri AI upgrade 'disappointing', says Maxim's Tom Forte

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Microsoft enters portable gaming with new ROG Xbox Ally devices

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Microsoft enters portable gaming with new ROG Xbox Ally devices

Microsoft ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X Handheld devices

Source: Xbox

Microsoft Xbox players will soon be able to take their favorite games anywhere with the launch of the new ROG Xbox Ally handhelds.

This is a first for Xbox, which has never released a handheld before.

The devices, developed in collaboration with ASUS, offer a full-screen Xbox experience meant for portable play.

Players will be able to access Xbox games, stream content, and play on the go with built-in support for cloud gaming.

“Players can look forward to an approachable gaming experience that travels with you wherever you go, featuring several new and first-of-their kind features on both devices,” Microsoft said in a press release.

The announcement follows last week’s debut of Nintendo‘s flagship Switch 2 and sets the stage for a new chapter in portable gaming.

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Vantage raises $820 million in a first-of-its-kind cloud and AI data center deal in Europe

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Vantage raises 0 million in a first-of-its-kind cloud and AI data center deal in Europe

U.S. data center operator Vantage has raised 720 million euros ($821.4 million) — the first of its kind deal in Europe.

The asset-backed securitization (ABS) deal, the first ever euro-denominated with data center assets on the continent, involves four data centers in Germany.

The company said it will be paying on average a 4.3% coupon on the bonds issued through the process.

In an ABS, Vantage raises money by using its data center infrastructure and future revenues from the facilities as collateral.

Vantage said it will use the funds primarily to pay off existing construction loans previously secured for the facilities.

“We believe the ABS market in particular is kind of best suited for our type of asset, which is real estate centric, high credit quality tenants, long term leases, something that is almost perfect for the ABS investor,” Sharif Metwalli, chief financial officer of Vantage Data Centers, told CNBC.

Vantage added that despite the large sum borrowed, the demand from investors exceeded the amount raised.

“So this transaction was actually pretty highly levered, frankly,” Rich Cosgray, senior vice president of global capital markets at Vantage Data Centers told CNBC. “It was higher leverage than our prior transaction and we had some investors that just weren’t comfortable at that leverage level.”

“Yet, despite that, we were basically two and four times oversubscribed on the respective financings, and we were able to tighten pricing pretty meaningfully through the marketing process,” Cosgray added.

The four facilities — two in Berlin and two in Frankfurt — have access to around 55 megawatts of power and “are fully leased to hyperscale customers,” the company said in a statement. The four facilities were valued at more than $1 billion earlier this year.

Last year, Vantage also raised £600 million through the first-ever securitization of a data center in Europe, the Middle East and Asia (EMEA). The deal involved two units from the company’s Cardiff campus with 148 megawatts of electricity power. Across the region, the company has 2,500 megawatts of data center capacity either operational or under development.

The transaction was led by Barclays Bank and Deutsche Bank as joint lead managers and Vantage was represented by the British law firm Clifford Chance.

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