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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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Here are 4 major moments that drove the stock market last week

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December 13, 2025

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Here are 4 major moments that drove the stock market last week

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Oracle says there have been ‘no delays’ in OpenAI arrangement after stock slide

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December 12, 2025

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Oracle says there have been 'no delays' in OpenAI arrangement after stock slide

Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk appears on a media tour of the Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, on Sept. 23, 2025.

Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Oracle on Friday pushed back against a report that said the company will complete data centers for OpenAI, one of its major customers, in 2028, rather than 2027.

The delay is due to a shortage of labor and materials, according to the Friday report from Bloomberg, which cited unnamed people. Oracle shares fell to a session low of $185.98, down 6.5% from Thursday’s close.

“Site selection and delivery timelines were established in close coordination with OpenAI following execution of the agreement and were jointly agreed,” an Oracle spokesperson said in an email to CNBC. “There have been no delays to any sites required to meet our contractual commitments, and all milestones remain on track.”

The Oracle spokesperson did not specify a timeline for turning on cloud computing infrastructure for OpenAI. In September, OpenAI said it had a partnership with Oracle worth more than $300 billion over the next five years.

“We have a good relationship with OpenAI,” Clay Magouyrk, one of Oracle’s two newly appointed CEOs, said at an October analyst meeting.

Doing business with OpenAI is relatively new to 48-year-old Oracle. Historically, Oracle grew through sales of its database software and business applications. Its cloud infrastructure business now contributes over one-fourth of revenue, although Oracle remains a smaller hyperscaler than Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

OpenAI has also made commitments to other companies as it looks to meet expected capacity needs.

In September, Nvidia said it had signed a letter of intent with OpenAI to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia equipment for the San Francisco artificial intelligence startup. The first phase of that project is expected in the second half of 2026.

Nvidia and OpenAI said in a September statement that they “look forward to finalizing the details of this new phase of strategic partnership in the coming weeks.”

But no announcement has come yet.

In a November filing, Nvidia said “there is no assurance that we will enter into definitive agreements with respect to the OpenAI opportunity.”

OpenAI has historically relied on Nvidia graphics processing units to operate ChatGPT and other products, and now it’s also looking at designing custom chips in a collaboration with Broadcom.

On Thursday, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan laid out a timeline for the OpenAI work, which was announced in October. Broadcom and OpenAI said they had signed a term sheet.

“It’s more like 2027, 2028, 2029, 10 gigawatts, that was the OpenAI discussion,” Tan said on Broadcom’s earnings call. “And that’s, I call it, an agreement, an alignment of where we’re headed with respect to a very respected and valued customer, OpenAI. But we do not expect much in 2026.”

OpenAI declined to comment.

WATCH: Oracle says there have been ‘no delays’ in OpenAI arrangement after stock slide

Oracle says there have been 'no delays' in OpenAI arrangement after stock slide

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AI order from Trump might be ‘illegal,’ Democrats and consumer advocacy groups claim

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December 12, 2025

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AI order from Trump might be ‘illegal,’ Democrats and consumer advocacy groups claim

“This is the wrong approach — and most likely illegal,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said in a post on X Thursday.

“We need a strong federal safety standard, but we should not remove the few protections Americans currently have from the downsides of AI,” Klobuchar said.

Trump’s executive order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to create a task force to challenge state laws regulating AI.

The Commerce Department was also directed to identify “onerous” state regulations aimed at AI.

The order is a win for tech companies such as OpenAI and Google and the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, which have all lobbied against state regulations they view as burdensome. 

It follows a push by some Republicans in Congress to impose a moratorium on state AI laws. A recent plan to tack on that moratorium to the National Defense Authorization Act was scuttled.

Collin McCune, head of government affairs at Andreessen Horowitz, celebrated Trump’s order, calling it “an important first step” to boost American competition and innovation. But McCune urged Congress to codify a national AI framework.

“States have an important role in addressing harms and protecting people, but they can’t provide the long-term clarity or national direction that only Congress can deliver,” McCune said in a statement.

Sriram Krishnan, a White House AI advisor and former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, during an interview Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” said that Trump is was looking to partner with Congress to pass such legislation.

“The White House is now taking a firm stance where we want to push back on ‘doomer’ laws that exist in a bunch of states around the country,” Krishnan said.

He also said that the goal of the executive order is to give the White House tools to go after state laws that it believes make America less competitive, such as recently passed legislation in Democratic-led states like California and Colorado.

The White House will not use the executive order to target state laws that protect the safety of children, Krishnan said.

Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, called Trump’s order “mostly bluster” and said the president “cannot unilaterally preempt state law.”

“We expect the EO to be challenged in court and defeated,” Weissman said in a statement. “In the meantime, states should continue their efforts to protect their residents from the mounting dangers of unregulated AI.”

Weissman said about the order, “This reward to Big Tech is a disgraceful invitation to reckless behavior
by the world’s largest corporations and a complete override of the federalist principles that Trump and MAGA claim to venerate.”

In the short term, the order could affect a handful of states that have already passed legislation targeting AI. The order says that states whose laws are considered onerous could lose federal funding.

One Colorado law, set to take effect in June, will require AI developers to protect consumers from reasonably foreseeable risks of algorithmic discrimination.

Some say Trump’s order will have no real impact on that law or other state regulations.

“I’m pretty much ignoring it, because an executive order cannot tell a state what to do,” said Colorado state Rep. Brianna Titone, a Democrat who co-sponsored the anti-discrimination law.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a law that, starting in January, will require major AI companies to publicly disclose their safety protocols. 

That law’s author, state Sen. Scott Wiener, said that Trump’s stated goal of having the United States dominate the AI sector is undercut by his recent moves. 

“Of course, he just authorized chip sales to China & Saudi Arabia: the exact opposite of ensuring U.S. dominance,” Wiener wrote in an X post on Thursday night. The Bay Area Democrat is seeking to succeed Speaker-emerita Nancy Pelosi in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Trump on Monday said he will Nvidia to sell its advanced H200 chips to “approved customers” in China, provided that U.S. gets a 25% cut of revenues.

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