At Tech City News, we’re always keen to shine a light on those who make up the UK’s thriving technology community.
This week, we spoke with Emily Foges, CEO of Luminance, a LegalTech startup.
Foges talked about disrupting the legal sector, her predictions for the industry and her 36-person paella pan.
Tech vertical: Artificial Intelligence
Funding: £5m (Invoke Capital & Talis Capital)
Staff count: 25
Location: Cambridge & London
Founded: September 2015
Q: Where did the idea for Luminance come from?
In M&A situations, the typical ‘data room’ has become a vast, impenetrable repository of documents with the potential to reveal or conceal the true nature – and therefore value – of a company. Law firms have tried various ways of keeping up with the volume of work this represents, but in 2015 we could see that none of the existing solutions were working. Adding human resources put budgets under severe strain, not to mention the boredom thresholds of young lawyers, whilst outsourcing raised concerns over quality and control. Technology solutions were emerging, but key-word search based systems require too much effort to set up rules and queries for too little return. The latest research from the University of Cambridge combines natural language processing, machine learning and probabilistic maths to be able to read large volumes of data extremely fast, and with a high degree of accuracy. The due diligence problem seemed like the ideal use case for this completely new approach....