How Lumin built global success using the humble PDF
It’s come a long way from the Christchurch construction sites where Lumin’s founding story begins back in 2014.
Good morning Caffeinators!
Instead of a recap of old news from last week, we thought we’d bring you a fresh conversation with Lumin founder Max Ferguson, who has some fascinating insights on everything from scaling your company to the future of business in the age of AI.
Check back in the coming weeks to hear more from Ferguson in Part Two and Three of our series in partnership with Lumin.
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Finn and the CAFFEINE team
When I caught up with Lumin founder Max Ferguson, he was dialled in from California after just stepping off a TechEx panel flanked by executives from eBay, PayPal and the Royal Bank of Canada.
“I was the tiny little startup amongst these big corporates,” he laughed, “But it all went super smoothly, which is great.”
It’s a long way from the Christchurch construction sites where Lumin’s founding story begins back in 2014.
Ferguson was an engineering student working on the city’s rebuild, growing frustrated that critical mark-ups kept disappearing between the field and the design office.
“We were engineers marking up paper plans,” Ferguson recalls. “Unfortunately, the changes we made on-site were getting lost, so they weren’t making it back to the designers.”
That simple pain point, information not flowing where it needed to, sparked the idea for a lightweight, cloud-based PDF editor.
Ten years later, Lumin has morphed into a global platform with 100 million users and customers including Netflix and Uber.
It’s North Star? One billion digitally signed agreements a year by 2030. It’s an impressive number, which underpins how central the humble PDF still is to our economy
However, ask any founder why exactly the PDF endures and remains such a pain point and you’ll probably get a shrug. Ask Ferguson and you’ll get a snappy history lesson. “PDF was created in 1993 as a way to represent things on paper in a digital format,” he explains.
As business began to digitise throughout the 90’s, people needed to move business from the on-paper and in-person world of the office to the frictionless, fast paced world of the internet and PDF was the format which bridged that gap.
But the format never escaped its print-era quirks: rigid layouts that don’t re-flow on mobile, no real-time collaboration, a maze of versions and readers.
I’ll bet every single person reading this has had some formatting nightmare in PDF, or at the very least helped an older relative turn a PDF into a word doc.
“It is really outdated,” he says. “Our challenge is how do we re-imagine that? How do we give people a trusted way to share information that isn’t shackled to paper?”
Lumin’s first answer was Lumin PDF, a browser-based editor that lets anyone annotate, redact or restructure documents without desktop software. Construction never became the highest user base, but those working in property, finance, and consultancy snapped it up. “We scaled to about a million users in the first six months,” Ferguson says and momentum has been compounding ever since.
While PDFs put Lumin on the map, they were never the final destination. The bigger play is really about trust—making it as easy to trust a document online as it is to recognise a wet-ink signature in a lawyer’s office.
After all, what PDF really represents is an attempt to digitise the certainty we place in a paper document. It’s both simple and foundational.
The next five years will likely collapse the gap between “I just met you online” and “we just signed a legally binding agreement.”
Lumin wants to be the invisible infrastructure that makes that leap feel as human as a handshake and as safe as a bank vault.
“If I send a document to you for signing, how do I know it was really you?” Ferguson asks.
As our professional lives increasingly take place completely online, it will become essential that all the business we conduct in person today can be conducted with the same level of trust, digitally.
Today Lumin’s platform includes:
Lumin Sign – the e-signature tool that now underpins roughly half of all New Zealand tenancy agreements.
AgreementGen – Use AI to generate an agreement from a simple prompt
AI Redaction & Review – ask the agent to “remove all personally identifiable information” and watch it scrub a 40-page PDF in seconds.
But under the hood, Lumin is working with both other businesses and Governments to wire these services into emerging digital-identity rails.
The company works with Auckland-based MATTR and various government pilots to verify signatures against digital driver’s licences and other verifiable credentials.
“When someone signs a document, we want to know it was them and not an AI bot,” Ferguson says.
As AI progresses ever more quickly, the need for global verification systems is essential.
But frictionless and accessible identity verification is not just about avoiding the negatives of AI but unlocking the positives.
“That one capability unlocks opening a bank account from your phone, taking out a mortgage, leasing a property, without ever stepping into a branch.”
Ferguson studied robotics and AI at Stanford, and while he’s naturally sceptical of sprinkle-on A.I hype, he’s clear eyed and excited about the possibilities.
“We didn’t want a token AI experience,” he says bluntly. Instead, the team mapped entire user journeys that could disappear under automation: drafting a contract, pulling customer data, sending it for signature, filing the archive. “We realised we could get AI to do that whole piece.”
He’s equally alive to the darker side. Ferguson points to fraudsters already impersonating real-estate agents to collect fake deposits and using generative tools to let them scale the scam.
“Our job is to protect users from that,” he says, which loops back to digital identity and cryptographic proofs—technical guard-rails that keep the bad actors out while letting honest business move faster.
With 100 million users already onboard, the path to a billion seems clear. But what lessons can founders learn from Lumin’s journey? And what does a post PDF business world look like?
Check back in the coming weeks to hear more insights from Ferguson in Part Two and Three of our series in partnership with Lumin.
We’re excited to partner with BNZ. As New Zealand's largest business bank, BNZ shares our mission to support the next wave of founders and operators. Over the coming months, we’ll be working together to share insights, tools, and stories that help you grow smarter and faster. Keep an eye out every Thursday for content powered by BNZ.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Want to get in touch with a news tip, bit of feedback or just to chat? Email hello@caffeinedaily.co