Legal AI startup Harvey hits $8 billion valuation with $160 million raise led by Andreessen Horowitz

Legal AI startup Harvey confirms $8B valuation | TechCrunch

Harvey on Thursday confirmed it closed a round of funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz, that values the legal AI startup at $8 billion after reports of the funding leaked in October. The startup raised $160 million in the round. This latest capital infusion came just months after it raised a $300 million in a Series E round at a $5 billion valuation in June. And that was just months after raising a Sequoia-led $300 million Series D at a $3 billion valuation in February. Harvey's investors include EQT, WndrCo, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Sarah Guo's Conviction, and Elad Gil. In September, just before raising this latest mega round, Harvey released some details about its business. While it declined to share any absolute numbers, just percentages of growth and retention (it later told TechCrunch that it surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue back in August), it said that it counts 50 of the top AmLaw 100 firms as its customers. It also serves corporate legal teams. As an industry entirely based on words, it makes sense that legal functions would be a perfect use case for LLMs: searching, summarizing, and drafting, all based on domain-specific training. But Harvey is also one of the best examples of how VCs are "kingmaking" these days. That involves pouring vast sums of money into a startup to signal how solid it is, which encourages large enterprise customers, like law firms, to sign big contracts in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Given that Harvey was founded in 2022, it may be far enough ahead of competitors -- both in customer acquisition and the reinforced training from working with so many law firms -- that it is the king of this market. At least, one of its long-time VCs, Elad Gil, thinks so. Gil told TechCrunch that Harvey is one of the AI market leaders that is experiencing bona fide growth because its tech and market position are "just working." Harvey's founder and CEO Winston Weinberg recently told TechCrunch's editor-in-chief Connie Loizos an incredible story of how it originally claimed the hearts of Silicon Valley's powerhouse VCs. It all started with a proof of concept about landlord-tenant law and a cold email to Sam Altman. Harvey became one of OpenAI Startup Fund's first investments. And it's been a VC darling ever since.

AI-focused legal startup Harvey raises $160M to expand platform capabilities - SiliconANGLE

AI-focused legal startup Harvey raises $160M to expand platform capabilities Harvey, a generative artificial intelligence startup developing a platform for legal professionals, said today it raised $160 million in new late-stage funding. The Series F round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, featuring new investors WndrCo and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc., as well as returning investors in Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Conviction and Elad Gil. The funding round values Harvey at $8 billion, up from $5 billion reported after its previous raise of $300 million in June and following a recent investment of €50 million, around $58 million, from EQT Growth. Harvey, officially Counsel AI Corp., uses generative AI to deliver intelligent tools for legal professionals, including lawyers at law firms, in-house legal teams at corporations and professional services firms. Its tools are used for tasks such as contract analysis, due diligence, compliance and litigation support to improve efficiency. Reportedly, more than 700 leading law firms and enterprises use the platform, representing over 74,000 attorneys. Customers include law firms such as Allen & Overy and the large accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. Harvey uses a number of AI models, including a custom-trained model built in partnership with OpenAI Group PBC for case law. It allows the company to provide extensive domain knowledge and capabilities for complex workflows that require more than a single large language model call. Harvey has also partnered with PwC to co-build a tax AI assistant that combines curated tax datasets with Harvey's LLM knowledge. "If you just do retrieval, you can answer very simple questions about areas of law that you aren't really an expert in, but that's actually not that useful for most attorneys," explained Winston Weinberg, co-founder and chief executive of Harvey. "With case law research, you're finding ammo for your argument, and that's much more difficult to do." In addition to the funding round, Harvey also announced the launch of Shared Spaces, a secure AI-driven collaborative platform for attorneys. With Spaces, law firms can share customized AI tools, such as workflows and playbooks, without revealing proprietary prompts or essential information used to build them. Ideally, this will allow teams to complete contract work and deal cycles faster. Harvey said it allows deeper and simpler collaboration between corporate in-house counsel to easily work with a law firm, providing greater transparency for AI use. It centralizes documents, complex analysis and workflows by allowing them to happen side-by-side. "We all know that legal work is deeply collaborative -- it's about partnership," said Rick Liu, strategic business development lead at Harvey. "And that partnership deserves a way to work that builds on that collaboration, instead of getting lost in email chains and version control." Shared Spaces provides direct access to Harvey's existing powerful models, workflow builders, AI agents and more. Non-Harvey users can also be brought into access Spaces, in combination with provisioned roles and permissions, clients can control exactly who can access, view and edit artifacts and outputs. All of this is fully auditable, allowing a management team to monitor and control who can access, edit and generate documents and artifacts.