HarveyAI: Meet the AI assistant that will change law forever

Meet the AI assistant for that will change law forever

In December 2023, they raised over $80M from investors like Kleiner Perkins, OpenAI and Sequoia

They already have contracts with massive enterprise companies like PwC and Phillips

Their revenue is up 10x in the last 12 months

So what’s the startup and who are the founders?

Harvey AI is basically ChatGPT for legal work. It’s an LLM trained with further legal data and helps lawyers deliver faster, and more cost-effective solutions for clients' issues.

The startup was founded by 29 year-old Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra only a couple of years out of university. 

Winston studied law at USC Gould, then spent a year as an associate at a major litigation firm - O'Melveny & Myers.

Gabe did a bachelors in CS at USC and a PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, which he dropped out of after a year. He’s worked as a research scientist for both DeepMind and Meta before having started Harvey AI.

The 2 were roommates during their time working. Since Winston worked at a law firm, he started to notice the LLM integration into work as a lawyer and thought he could build something better. 

He approached Gabe to see if the idea was viable and the 2 started working on what is now Harvey AI…

Harvey AI can answer questions and complete tasks for those producing and editing legal documents where precision is key.

In theory, ChatGPT can do the same thing as Harvey - lot’s of lawyers are using ChatGPT to automate repetitive tasks like drafting up legal documents. However, there are a few key differences:

Harvey vs ChatGPT:

1. Data privacy controls - With Harvey, regulatory hurdles are overcome over client data being used to train models.

2. Fine tuned models - ChatGPT provides a more general output, while Harvey is trained on a set of specifically legal data to better understand inputs given by a lawyer

3. Workflow features - Harvey has implemented workflow features which make a lawyers job easier like citations. Every piece of output by Harvey has a citation lawyers can cross reference

Harvey has multiple high-level partnerships with conglomerates like pWc and Allen and Overy. 

Their strategic partnership with pWc includes exclusivity among ‘The Big Four’, showing a big step in innovation and disruption in the legal field.

Allen and Overy’s head of innovation even talked about their strategic partnership saying “ the goal of this partnership is to disrupt the legal market before it disrupts us”. 

Harvey has even recently collabed with Microsoft, launching on Microsoft Azure last month.

Big conglomerates know that AI is going to fundamentally change their businesses - hence partnerships with AI startups like Harvey.

“At Harvey, we believe that the future of AI will not be a chatbot that compliments your workflow; it will be the platform your workflow is built on. This is why we partner with entire firms. These close collaborations allow us to find solutions for lawyers that go beyond training data and treatises” Pereyra and Weinberg wrote in a blog post.

“You can't build self-driving cars in a lab and understanding the real problems faced by our clients is fundamental to making those problems AI-soluble.”

The International Legal Generative AI Report found that 89% of lawyers are aware of generative AI, and 41% have experimented with it in some fashion. What’s crazy is this number will only grow higher which means this is a huge opportunity.

According to Sequoia, “Harvey is in the business of giving people superpowers. First, lawyers. Next, professional services. Eventually, all of knowledge work.” 

This means Harvey will not only help lawyers, but eventually help in all types of professional service industries from management consulting to accounting.

Let’s break down their numbers

Harvey has reported that it’s done $10M in revenue in December 2023 which is up tenfold from 2022.

Harvey was first funded $5M in its seed round by the OpenAI startup fund in November 2022. This was one of the OpenAI startup fund’s first ever investments.

In April 2023, Harvey raised $21M in a series A round led by Sequoia Capital. And in December 2023, they raised another $80M in a series B round led by Kleiner Perkins and Elad Gil, valuing Harvey at $715M.

Competition

Harvey plans to continue scaling its operations and produce more specialized AI for different clients. However, other startups have also found opportunities to exploit the legal industry using AI.

One example of this is CaseText, which has an AI legal assistant that does document review, deposition preparation and contract analysis. CaseText has raised a total of over $64M.

Spellbook, a startup with a Gen-AI legal tool, raised $27M in January this year. Lexion is another legal tech startup that offers AI-powered contract management and raised $20M in April 2023.