In the latest sign of investors’ enthusiasm for so-called ’Lawtech’, the developer of a system for automatically reviewing contracts with artificial intelligence today announced that it had secured $50m (£38.6m) from a venture capital fund. Canada-based Kira Systems said it had raised the money from Insight Venture Partners in return for a minority stake in the privately held business. 

Kira says its software employs proprietary machine learning techniques to identify and extract relevant information from contracts and other related documents, cutting the time spend on document review by between 20% and 90%. Until now it has eschewed external funding. However in the race to install systems in leading firms and in-house legal departments the market appears to be consolidating.

Noah Waisberg, co-founder and chief executive of Kira said the funding would allow the company to ’more swiftly execute on our long-term vision’. 

Among the ventures jockeying for market position in applying machine learning technology to extracting information from contracts and other legal documents are iManage, which last year acquired UK startup RAVN, Luminance, which is backed by magic circle firm Slaughter and May and Cambridge-based startup ThoughtRiver.