Min-Kyu Jung Left the Law, Learned to Code, and Found the Real Product Was Trust

At Bell Gully in Auckland, Min-Kyu Jung developed a water-cooler refrain. It began with some variation of “why doesn’t someone just build...” and ended with another piece of legal work that seemed unnecessarily manual. Corporate contracts demanded precision, yet the machinery around them was often a scavenger hunt through folders, precedents, clauses, and repeated edits. Jung had trained for law. He found himself preoccupied by workflow.

His original plan was tidy: practice in New Zealand for a few years, then work at a large London firm. Instead, the recurring annoyance became what he called an all-consuming dissatisfaction with the status quo. A Paul Graham post suggested that a determined person could learn enough programming in six months to start a company. Jung needed roughly two months to make his own attempt. He left legal practice and, in 2021, started what became Ivo with Jacob Duligall, a former Xero engineer.

There is a neat temptation to describe the career change as law discarded for software. The more accurate story is that Jung carried law's habits across the border. Contracts are contextual. Words inherit meaning from other words. A sensible edit for one company can be an unacceptable concession for another. An answer matters, but so do its precedent, reasoning, and consequences. Those instincts became the product brief.

The useful kind of rejection

Early versions were not immediately convincing. Jung has said that prior prototypes earned a polite, lukewarm response, the entrepreneurial equivalent of a dinner guest praising the water. Then one prototype split the room. Some lawyers liked it enough to ask whether they could invest. Others showed what he described as a visceral aversion. The polarization was useful. It meant the product had finally touched a nerve.

Another turning point began with cold outbound. A message to entrepreneur and investor Daniel Gross led to Ivo's first capital. Gross also encouraged Jung to move to San Francisco and expanded the scale of what the young founder thought possible. Jung brought the team over for an initial three-month stay in 2023. They remained. The New Zealand company acquired a Bay Area headquarters, but kept the Kiwi directness in its founder's story.

San Francisco supplied connections and urgency. Jung found a culture where accomplished people would take meetings with unknown founders, provided the work was interesting. Yet access did not settle the product question. For that, he stopped coding for three months and spoke with about 400 people. He eventually met more than a thousand legal professionals. The conversations narrowed Ivo toward in-house teams and away from the broad promise of software for everyone with a law degree.

“Enterprise sales is all about trust.”Min-Kyu Jung

That focus sounds modest until one considers the temptation to hedge. Law firms and corporate departments both review documents, but their incentives differ. An in-house team serves one organization. Its contracts encode that organization's risk tolerance, commercial history, fallback clauses, and occasional scars. Jung chose to build around those particulars. Ivo would live inside Microsoft Word, where lawyers already negotiated, and learn the positions of the company rather than behave like a bright stranger with amnesia.

The junior lawyer in the machine

Generative AI created a peculiar interface problem. It could produce plausible legal language while remaining capable of error. For contract work, fluency without accountability is a polished banana peel. Jung's preferred analogy is the junior lawyer. Junior associates do not deliver perfect work every time, but colleagues can inspect their reasoning, ask why an edit was made, and develop a sense for where closer review is necessary.

Ivo's design follows that model. Recommendations stay closely tied to the customer's inputs, playbooks, prior agreements, and deal context. Users can see why a conclusion appeared and dismiss what they do not want. By 2026, the company said a contract review could involve more than 400 model calls in a multistep pipeline, with steps evaluated for accuracy. The number is less interesting as computational theater than as evidence of the problem's shape: legal judgment does not arrive in one cheerful prompt.

Trust also lives outside the interface. Jung defines product expansively, including every interaction a customer has with the company. At a large enterprise, a buyer risks professional credibility by recommending an unknown vendor. Established names arrive with borrowed confidence. A startup has to manufacture its own through responsiveness. Ivo engineers and designers join calls, watch users share screens, and observe where the workflow catches. Prospects who offered feedback sometimes saw features built over a weekend.

This is the part of the playbook worth stealing. Customer proximity is often discussed as a virtue and scheduled as a quarterly ritual. Jung made it operational. Builders see the struggle directly. Feedback is answered quickly enough to become proof. A narrow market makes the details legible. Each kept promise makes the next promise slightly easier to believe.

From redlines to memory

Ivo first gained attention for reviewing and redlining agreements. The software checks language against a company's playbook, identifies risk, and suggests limited edits rather than repainting the document. Its scope then widened. A repository could search executed agreements, connect amendments to parent contracts, group related document families, and show where terms departed from standard positions. Review 2.0 added negotiation history and deal context. Collaborate, launched in August 2026, extended the system across intake, routing, approvals, negotiation, and signature preparation.

The evolution reflects Jung's more provocative observation: contracts are business documents first and legal documents second. They contain pricing, obligations, approval paths, negotiated exceptions, and evidence of how an organization behaves when the boilerplate meets reality. A template records the preferred position. Closed deals reveal the positions people actually accepted.

Enterprise customers came to include Uber, IBM, Shopify, Atlassian, Reddit, Canva, Pinterest, and Quora. The company announced a $4.8 million seed round in 2024, a $16 million Series A in 2025, and a $55 million Series B led by Blackbird in January 2026. Ivo reported that annual recurring revenue had multiplied sixfold in the year before the Series B. It planned offices in New York and London, more research and development, and additional customer support infrastructure.

Money, however, is a blunt measure of the story. The more revealing artifact is an internal memo Jung wrote in January 2025, when Ivo had 14 employees. He worried that hiring would make communication costs explode. Three people create three possible lines between colleagues. Four create six. Fourteen create 91. At 25 people, the count reaches 300. A growing company could acquire meetings the way a forgotten fridge acquires smells.

Fourteen people arrive in one day

Jung's prescriptions were plain. Bias away from private Slack messages, so useful context remains visible and linkable. Write decisions down. Make communication concise enough to respect the reader. Let people closest to the work exercise judgment. Keep everyone, including non-customer-facing staff, close to users. Most choices are reversible, he argued, and speed creates more contact with reality, which creates more chances to correct course.

He published the memo on his personal site in July 2026 as a time capsule. The timing supplied the joke. In the period when the original memo worried about managing 14 people, Ivo later welcomed 14 new employees in a single day. The dining-room table in an Airbnb, where every conversation was practically an all-hands, had become an organizational design problem.

The memo also exposes a productive tension in Jung's thinking. Legal work rewards caution. Startups reward motion. He does not resolve the conflict by choosing one. He asks the company to move rapidly on reversible decisions and build scrutiny into high-stakes outputs. “Slow start-ups don't win,” he has said. Nor does a legal product that asks professionals to take its confidence on faith.

Jung has described building Ivo as work that gives him direction, and San Francisco as a place that enlarged his ambitions. His stated goal is global in scale. The practical route remains almost comically specific: another customer call, another redline, another explanation attached to another machine judgment. Grand ambition, clause by clause.

His old London plan was never completed. In a sense, it was negotiated away. The replacement is less orderly and more revealing. A young lawyer spotted low-hanging fruit, learned to code, discovered that software alone was insufficient, and built the company around the harder task of being believed. Every contract begins with an agreement. Every enduring software company may, too.