Harvey raises $300 million at a $5 billion valuation to become a legal AI for lawyers around the world
Happy Monday. This is Alexandra Sternlicht Subbing.
Today we share news that Legal LLM Harvey has raised a $300 million Series E at a $5 billion valuation. The company, which sells Attorney AI Solutions, lists clients from large law firms such as Paul and Weiss, as well as the in-house legal departments of large corporations, including KKR and PWC. With the new funding, Harvey will double its heads and expand its global presence and diversity to new specialized services such as tax accounting.
“If you scale as quickly as we do, you need to get a raise like this,” says Winston Weinberg, the company’s CEO, co-founder and lawyer. Harvey is only three years old, but has clients in 53 countries and boasts over 340 people.
Series E is co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue. Participants include Sequoia, GV, DST Global, Conviction, Elad Gil, Open AI Startup Fund, Elemental, SV Angel, Kris Fredrickson, and Rev (Relx Group, owner of VC Group LexisNexis).
On Friday, I was able to visit Harvey’s fashionable Park Avenue NYC headquarters. And it was full of lawyers. Kitchen lawyer. A lawyer spinning in an ergonomic chair. The lawyer smiles and waves at me.
CEO Weinberg points out that the attorneys workforce is unique to the company’s New York office, with only 18% of its personnel being lawyers, but he believes these attorney employers are essential to achieving Harvey’s “partnership.” So far, the strategy has been working. Harvey boasts 337 legal clients.
Long before Openai released its first ChatGpt bot, entrepreneurs were trying to make AI lawyers a thing. These companies have mostly failed. Harvey has not failed due to investor accounts.
“We’ve seen them perform very well across all facets,” says Ilya Fushman, partner at Kleiner Perkins, who co-leaded the round and co-leaded Harvey’s Series B and C. “It sets a blueprint for how vertical AI enterprises can build and execute.”
Still, Harvey is just one solution in a crowded field of AI lawyers who are aiming to disrupt the $1 trillion legal market. This funding could be meaningless for a long time, but Harvey has earned the highest public reputation for legal AI startups. Competitor Ironclad raised the 2022 Series E at a valuation of $3.2 billion, while Clio raised the Series F at a valuation of $2024.9 billion.
Harvey’s technology is built on top of leading language models such as Openai’s ChatGpt and Claude’s Gemini, and is combined with data and workflows designed for lawyers. It also customizes the company-specific data model by supplying technology-specific documents that remain private to the company. Client data security and privacy are clearly important in legal matters, but Harvey say They meet industry-recognized security standards, engage in regular third-party testing, and claim that over 10% of organizations are security experts.
Juan Pablo Sandoval Celis, an attorney/MBA who works with the company’s business development team, says that clients have used Harvey to reduce the legal process from weeks to minutes.
Of course, law firms make money from the time they charge their clients. Therefore, lawyers may discover efficiency with Harvey, which results in greater revenue losses for these law firms. Weinberg points out that certain specialist tasks are billed hourly, while certain legal tasks are increasingly billed at a fixed fee. He also believes that the widespread use of AI will increase the work of lawyers. “I think we’ll reach a certain point where we can’t compete or support large companies unless we’re using tools like this.”
see you tomorrow,
Alexandra Sternlicht
X: @imsternlicht
Email: alex.sternlicht@fortune.com
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Exit
– KKR I agreed to get it Zenith Energyan independent electricity producer based in Rivervale, Australia; Pacific Equity PartnerS, Opseu Pension Trustand Foresight Group. Financial conditions have not been disclosed.