Harvey’s valuation has climbed to $15.5bn in its latest funding round, the company announced today (9 September), with the legal tech startup raising $550m from investors as it looks to help firms and in-house legal teams ‘own their intelligence at scale.’
The company’s valuation has tripled since last summer, when it was valued at $5bn, underscoring the meteoric rise of legal tech startups like Harvey and Legora, which were founded in 2022 and 2023 respectively.
New investors included Diffusion and Lightspeed Venture Partners, which led the funding round, as well as Sapphire Ventures and Whale Rock.
Latham & Watkins advised Harvey on the financing, with a Bay Area team led by global technology industry group vice chair Seth Gottlieb and corporate partner Alex Kassai.
The round comes weeks after Harvey published research about the development of its first open-weight model, and just months after its launch in May of its Legal Agent Benchmark (LAB) tool.
LAB is an open-source repository of legal tasks that can help clients train agents to perform tasks they encounter in their workflows. LAB partners include Nvidia, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind.
Harvey leads the pack of startups looking to gain market share as law firms look for ways to leverage developing AI technologies. In March, Legora also raised $550m, though at a lower valuation of $5.5bn.
However, the company is in early-stage talks with investors to raise new capital at a valuation of $10bn, according to the Financial Times.
Harvey, which works with over 200,000 lawyers and nearly 2,500 organizations, counts among its clients major law firms like A&O Shearman, HSF Kramer, Reed Smith, and Latham & Watkins, with the West Coast giant announcing a firmwide deployment of Harvey last summer.
Earlier this year the legal tech market was shaken by the entry of Anthropic, which launched Claude for Legal in May, soon after it announced a multi-year partnership with Freshfields.
Also in May, Kirkland & Ellis announced its intention to invest $500m in developing a proprietary AI tech platform, as firms explore different approaches and look to avoid being tied to continued, and potentially rising, costs associated with third-party AI licences.
Harvey was founded in 2022 by Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra. Weinberg was previously an associate at O’Melveny and Pereyra spent time working as a research scientist at Meta.
In a statement about the latest funding round, the pair said: ‘We plan to hire and develop the best team in the space to support our clients through the next wave of AI transformation.’
