Ivo vs Robin AI: In-House Contract Review Compared
Short answer: this is no longer a two-horse race. Ivo and Robin AI were genuinely comparable playbook-driven contract review tools for in-house legal teams, both redlining inside Microsoft Word, both gating pricing behind a demo. But the two companies moved in opposite directions. Ivo raised a $55m Series B in January 2026 and is expanding. Robin AI ran out of road: trade press reported layoffs in October 2025, an HMRC winding-up petition in November, the sale of its managed services team to Scissero in December, and the hiring of its remaining engineers by Microsoft in January 2026. If you are shortlisting today, Ivo is a live option and Robin AI is not. If you are already a Robin AI customer, your question is not "which is better" but "what replaces this, and when."
That is an uncomfortable thing to publish, which is roughly why it has not been published. We do not sell either of these tools, so we have no reason to keep a dead comparison alive.
What do Ivo and Robin AI each do?
Both products belong to the same narrow category: playbook review for in-house teams. Not document automation, not full contract lifecycle management, not legal research. The assumption behind both is that your team sees the same contract types over and over, that you have positions you always take on liability, indemnity, term, and data processing, and that a lawyer reading every one of those clauses from scratch is waste.
Ivo reviews contracts against a playbook and applies redlines directly in Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Beyond single-document review it maps relationships between agreements and answers questions across a whole contract set, which is the part that pushes it past a pure drafting add-in. It was founded in New Zealand and has since moved its headquarters to San Francisco.
Robin AI did playbook-driven redlining in Word as well, but its distinguishing feature was never the model. It was the managed service: a human-in-the-loop layer where Robin's own legal team reviewed AI output before it came back to you. That was a real answer to a real objection, and it was also expensive to run. Roughly 75 people worked in that division, according to reporting on its sale.
You can see both entries, with pricing lines and categories, in our directory: Ivo and Robin AI. For the wider field of tools that solve adjacent versions of this problem, we compared ten of them in AI Contract Review Software: 10 Compared.
How do Ivo and Robin AI score side by side?
Here is the head-to-head on the five things in-house buyers actually ask about. Scores are out of 5 and reflect the position as of August 2026. Robin AI's scores are historical, describing the product as it was sold, because the company no longer operates independently.
| Criterion | Ivo | Robin AI |
|---|---|---|
| Playbook setup | 4/5. Turns your existing templates and executed contracts into a working playbook rather than making you author rules from a blank page. Lawyer-built playbooks are the core of the product. | 4/5. Comparable playbook redlining, plus the option to outsource the judgment entirely to Robin's managed review team. Strong if you had no capacity to build a playbook yourself. |
| Word integration | 5/5. Redlines applied in Microsoft Word and Google Docs. Covering both is unusual in this category and matters if your counterparties are split across the two. | 3/5. Word-based redlining, no Google Docs equivalent. The engineering team behind it now works on Microsoft's own Word AI features. |
| Data residency | 3/5. Publishes SOC 2 and ISO 27001, states GDPR and CCPA compliance, and states it never trains AI models on customer data. Named regional hosting is not published, so residency is a diligence question, not a website answer. | 2/5. Security page claims data "never leaves Robin's secure AWS Cloud environment" and that customer data is not used for training without express consent, with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certification. No named region either, and the page now describes a wound-down business. |
| Pricing transparency | 1/5. Pricing on request. No published tiers, no self-serve trial. | 1/5. Pricing on request. Same demo gate. |
| Rebrand / ownership history | 3/5. One clean rebrand from Latch to Ivo in April 2024. Independent and funded. The only cost is that older reviews are filed under a name that no longer exists. | 1/5. Independent, then broken into pieces across three months. Managed services to Scissero, engineers to Microsoft. Nothing about the ownership trail favours a new buyer. |
The pricing row is the one that should annoy you. Two products aimed at the same buyer, both refusing to publish a number. That is the norm in this category rather than the exception, and we broke down what it costs you in our legal AI pricing guide.
How do their playbook approaches differ?
This is where the two genuinely diverged, and it is worth understanding even now, because it is the axis you should evaluate any replacement on.
Ivo's approach is to reduce the setup tax. Rather than asking a legal ops person to sit down and encode fifty positions as rules, it converts what you already have, templates and previously negotiated agreements, into a playbook you can review against. The bet is that your standards are already expressed in your documents, and the job is extraction rather than authoring. Ivo's own framing around its Series B leans on lawyer-built playbooks used to standardise review, and it reported customers saving up to 75 percent of manual review time, which is a vendor figure and should be read as one.
Robin AI's approach was to absorb the setup tax on your behalf. If you did not have the internal capacity to define a playbook or to check the AI's work, Robin would supply lawyers to do it. This is closer to a legal process outsourcing arrangement with software attached than to a pure software purchase.
Both are legitimate answers. But they carry very different failure modes, and the difference explains a lot about what happened next. Software margins do not survive contact with a services business unless the services business is priced like one. Reporting by Artificial Lawyer put Robin AI at around $10m in 2024 revenue after roughly $50m raised across 2023 and 2024, with a headcount that peaked near 200 before the October 2025 redundancy round. Those are reported figures from that publication, not company disclosures. Growth did not keep pace with burn.
If ownership churn in this market is a recurring problem for you, we maintain a running legal AI acquisitions and rebrands tracker, which is also where the Latch to Ivo rename is logged.
Where does Robin's EU footing matter?
Robin AI was a London company, and for UK and EU in-house teams that was a real part of the pitch. A UK-headquartered vendor with UK-based reviewers is an easier internal conversation than a US vendor when your privacy team asks where personal data in your contracts ends up.
Two caveats, and both apply to Ivo as much as to Robin.
First, a company's headquarters is not its data residency. Robin's security page says data stays inside its AWS environment and that customer data is not used for model training without express consent, but it does not name a region, and neither does Ivo's. Where the data actually sits is a question for a data processing agreement and a subprocessor list, not for a marketing page. That includes the subprocessors, because the underlying model provider is usually one of them and is frequently in the US.
Second, the legal position is less dramatic than vendors imply. The UK holds an adequacy decision from the European Commission, and the Commission's guidance on adequacy decisions confirms that personal data can flow from the EU to an adequate third country without additional safeguards. A UK-hosted vendor was never automatically the only compliant option for an EU team, and a US-hosted vendor was never automatically excluded. It is a diligence exercise, not a flag on a map.
The practical point for anyone reading this in 2026: Robin's EU footing is no longer a purchasing advantage, because there is no independent Robin to buy it from. If UK or EU residency is a hard requirement, ask candidate vendors for named hosting regions in writing and check their subprocessor list before the demo, not after. None of this is legal advice, and your privacy counsel should make the call.
What do teams report about pricing?
Neither vendor published a price. Our directory records both as "pricing on request," which is the honest description of a demo gate.
What that means in practice is that the only pricing signal available is second-hand and unreliable. Comparison sites fill the gap with placeholder data rather than admit they do not know: one widely indexed comparison lists Robin AI at "$0" with a free version, which is not a discount, it is an empty database field being rendered as a fact. We are not going to invent a number to compete with that.
What you can do is force the issue in the sales process. Ask for per-seat versus per-document pricing explicitly, because playbook review tools price both ways and the difference is enormous depending on your volume. Ask what implementation costs on top of licence, since playbook configuration is where the hidden cost lives. Ask for the price at renewal, not just year one. And if a vendor will not give you a number before a discovery call, that is information about how they sell, which is worth knowing on its own.
If a published price is a hard requirement for you, this category does have options. Gavel Exec lists a paid tier and a free query allowance, and Genie AI publishes tiers. Both are in our contract review category, and we covered the genuinely free end of the market in Free and Low-Cost AI Legal Tools That Actually Exist.
Which team should pick which?
Pick Ivo if you are an in-house team with recurring contract volume, you have existing templates and executed agreements to learn from, and your counterparties work in both Word and Google Docs. It is funded, growing, and the setup model asks less of you than authoring a playbook from scratch. Legal IT Insider reported the $55m Series B in January 2026, led by Blackbird, alongside company-reported growth figures including 500 percent ARR growth since February 2025. Treat the growth numbers as vendor-supplied. Treat the funding as the durability signal it is.
Do not pick Robin AI, because it is not available to pick. Legal IT Insider reported in January 2026 that Microsoft hired seven former Robin AI staff into its Word team, describing Robin as a failed legal technology company, and noting that Microsoft stated it had no plans to acquire Robin AI. The managed services division had gone to Scissero the month before.
If you are a current Robin AI customer, your priority order is: export your playbook logic and your contract data now while you can, confirm what happens to your data under the wind-down, and run a replacement evaluation with residency and exit terms written into the shortlist criteria rather than added at the end. The lesson is not that Robin was a bad product. It is that vendor durability belongs in your evaluation matrix next to feature fit, and that a managed-service layer you depend on is a dependency on a company's balance sheet.
If you specifically wanted the human review layer, note that it still exists, just under different ownership at Scissero. That may or may not suit you, but it is a different purchase from buying software.
For the broader shortlist, including the enterprise platforms that in-house teams weigh against point solutions, see Harvey vs CoCounsel vs Legora.
Frequently asked questions
What was Ivo called before?
Ivo was called Latch. The company rebranded to Ivo in April 2024, alongside a $4.8m funding round. The name comes from Ivo of Kermartin, the patron saint of lawyers. This is worth knowing because several comparison and company-data sites still index the product under the old name, so reviews and profiles filed under "Latch" may be describing the same product. We log this and other name changes in our acquisitions and rebrands tracker.
Is Robin AI good for in-house teams?
It was built for them, and the playbook redlining plus optional human review combination suited teams without internal legal ops capacity. The problem is not product quality, it is availability. Following the October 2025 layoffs, a November 2025 winding-up petition from HMRC reported by The Lawyer, the December 2025 sale of its managed services team to Scissero, and the January 2026 departure of its engineering team to Microsoft, Robin AI is not a viable purchase for an in-house team today. Evaluate alternatives instead.
Does Ivo work in Microsoft Word?
Yes. Ivo applies redlines directly in Microsoft Word, and also in Google Docs. Supporting both is relatively uncommon in this category, where most tools commit to Word alone. If a meaningful share of your counterparties send Google Docs, that dual support is a genuine differentiator rather than a checkbox.
How much do Ivo and Robin AI cost?
Neither published a price. Both list pricing on request and route buyers through a demo, which our directory records as "pricing on request" for each. Any specific dollar figure you find for either product on a comparison site should be checked against the vendor directly, because several of those sites render empty database fields as prices. Expect enterprise per-seat or per-document pricing for Ivo, and expect implementation and playbook configuration to be quoted separately from licence.
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This article is software evaluation and industry analysis. It is not legal advice, and it is not advice on procurement, insolvency, or data protection compliance. Verify vendor claims, security posture, and contractual terms directly with the vendor and with your own counsel before buying.