Harvey Raises $100M to Revolutionize Legal Workflows with AI-Powered Copilot for Lawyers

Harvey Raises $100M to Revolutionize Legal Workflows with AI-Powered Copilot for Lawyers

Harvey, an AI-driven startup developing a "copilot" for lawyers, has secured $100 million in a Series C funding round led by GV, Google's corporate venture arm. This latest investment brings Harvey's total funding to $206 million and values the company at $1.5 billion.

Co-founders Winston Weinberg and Gabriel Pereyra announced on Harvey's blog that the new capital will primarily be used to gather and curate data to train domain-specific AI models, expand the team, and extend Harvey's paid services to new regions. They emphasized the importance of investing in engineering, data, and domain expertise to build AI-native systems for complex legal tasks.

Harvey, launched in 2022 by Weinberg, a former securities and antitrust litigator, and Pereyra, a former research scientist at DeepMind and Google Brain, leverages OpenAI's GPT-4 model. It can answer legal questions in natural language, extract information from trial transcripts, find supporting legal documents, and generate drafts of legal filings.

Despite its capabilities, Harvey faces challenges. The sensitive nature of legal work may make some law firms hesitant to use the tool, and AI's tendency to generate inaccurate information is a significant concern. As a result, Harvey includes a disclaimer that it is not intended to provide legal advice to non-lawyers and should be used under the supervision of licensed attorneys.

Harvey competes with other AI tools like Casetext, which assists with legal research, and Klarity, which automates contract review. However, Harvey stands out by being used daily by tens of thousands of lawyers at prominent firms such as Allen & Overy, Macfarlanes, and PwC. Since last December, Harvey's annual recurring revenue and workforce have both tripled.

Previously, Harvey aimed to raise $600 million at a valuation of at least $2 billion to acquire the legal research service vLex and enhance its AI capabilities, but these plans did not materialize, leading to the reduced Series C round.

This latest funding round also saw participation from OpenAI, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil, and SV Angel, marking a significant step in Harvey's mission to revolutionize legal workflows with AI.