How Lumin is building trust infrastructure online and what that unlocks
Lumin has morphed from relatively humble beginnings into a global platform with 100 million users and customers including Netflix and Uber.
Welcome to Monday!
Instead of a recap of old news from last week, we’re bringing you part two of our conversation with Lumin founder Max Ferguson in our ongoing partnership series, where he details how solving a seemingly simple problem scales up to tackling one of the great issues of our time. Check back in the weeks ahead for part three.
Have a great start to your week,
Finn and the Caffeine team
How Lumin is building trust infrastructure online and what that unlocks
In startup land, the real success stories come from founders solving what at first seems a basic problem which ends up scaling to tackle an issue of global significance.
Take Lumin PDF, the browser tool that lets anyone annotate, redact or rearrange a PDF without downloading desktop software.
Lumin created the lightweight, cloud-based software to help solve a simple pain point of information not flowing where it needed to within a business.
Ten years later, Lumin has morphed into a global platform with 100 million users and customers including Netflix and Uber.
Talking to Lumin Founder Max Ferguson, it’s clear that what at first appears as a PDF problem is really a trust problem.
“It's really about working on those foundational things, which unlock so many other processes. For example, in New Zealand, we've got some really good signature law but it's kinda vague too. It says a signature is almost anything you want it to be,” he explains.
“What that means is companies like banks don't necessarily trust it. So there's a whole bunch of banks in New Zealand that will still require you to come into the branch to sign things to open an account or take out a mortgage.”
The humble document is just the container; the real job is convincing two strangers, separated by continents and algorithms, that their agreement is genuine, tamper-proof and legally binding.
When Ferguson talks about building trust, he means it a lot more literally than most because Lumin is really building trust infrastructure. Something technical, verifiable, and foundational. In other words, something you can build a business on top of.
As more of the economy moves online, he believes that trust infrastructure is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s the missing piece. “When someone signs a document,” Ferguson says, “we want to know it was them and not an AI bot.”
That may sound like a future-tense problem, but it's not. Deepfake impersonations, AI-powered phishing, and digital fraud are already here. And with remote work, international hiring, and AI automation all going mainstream, the ability to trust a digital interaction, without having met the other party is now essential.
In the analogue world, trust came with physicality. A handshake, a notarised signature, a face across the table. But those cues don’t translate neatly to a browser window.
“We’ve lost a lot of the natural stop-gaps,” Ferguson explains. “When you go into a lawyer’s office and sign a document, you’ve got a pretty good sense that the person you’re talking to is actually the lawyer. But in an automated system, that confidence can disappear.”
Lumin’s answer is to rebuild those stop-gaps in a digital-native way. The company is investing in identity verification, working with partners like Auckland-based MATTR to connect Lumin’s signing tools to emerging government-backed identity frameworks. These include digital driver’s licences already being piloted in Australia, the UK, and several US states.
“If we can allow people to sign documents and tap into this network of trust using these verified credentials, then we can make sure anything signed with Lumin has been done in a truly secure way.”
It’s not just about security for its own sake. It’s about unlocking the next wave of digital business.
Ferguson lights up when talking about what happens once you get digital trust right, particularly in places like New Zealand, where distance and decentralisation shape our economy.
“If you want to open an account with a bank in Christchurch but you’re based in Auckland, how do you make that work? You still have to go in-branch a lot of the time. That’s just not sustainable.”
It’s also inefficient. And Lumin believes that inefficiency doesn’t just slow business down, it limits who gets to participate in the economy.
“We’re a country of small businesses,” Ferguson says. “So if we can empower them so they don’t have to manually process invoices or chase paperwork across platforms, they can get on with doing what they’re actually passionate about.”
At its core, Lumin is making trust and verification frictionless without making it fragile.
Pieces of that puzzle already ship in Lumin’s product line-up:
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.
That starts with document signing. But it doesn’t end there. “The PDF was a stepping stone,” Ferguson says. “It helped digitise the paper world. But we’re now trying to build what comes next.”
What comes next is about reducing the gap between intent and action and empowering small teams to perform like big ones. Which is where emerging technologies come in. “We realised we could get AI to handle entire workflows,” he explains. “Drafting a contract, pulling data from a CRM, sending it for signature, archiving the result: we can automate that entire journey.”
That kind of automation could allow a five-person startup to operate with the efficiency of a 500-person enterprise. And it’s already happening. Ferguson points to one Lumin partner, Lodge, a tax service for sole traders, as an example.
“They’ve got maybe five employees. But because they can harness AI tools effectively, from the outside, you’d think it’s a 100-person business. The tools have levelled the playing field.”
Of course, the same tech that empowers honest businesses also empowers bad actors. And Ferguson is under no illusions about that.
As noted in part one of our series with Lumin, already in real estate, we see fraudsters impersonating agents to steal deposits. AI means that kind of scam can now scale. They can fake listings, fake documents, even fake conversations.
That’s why the company is doubling down on verification, secure identity rails, and cryptographic signing. The goal isn’t just to make it possible to do serious business online, it’s to make it safe.
For Lumin, keeping customers safe is an essential part of their mission: one billion agreements signed annually by 2030. It’s a big number, but it’s not about vanity.
If trust breaks, the whole system falls apart.
“If we get to that number, it means we’ve built infrastructure that works,” Ferguson says. “It means people are using Lumin as the backbone of their business workflows. That’s the impact we want to have.”
To get there, the company is continuing to expand its suite of tools including AI-assisted drafting, secure document management, and deeper integrations with digital identity providers. But it’s also keeping its core mission front and centre.
“We’re not just chasing growth,” Ferguson says. “We’re building trust.”
In a world where almost everything is moving online but trust hasn’t quite caught up yet, that’s not just a business opportunity, it’s solving one of the key problems of our time.
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