Harvey, a startup that has developed an AI-powered “copilot” for lawyers, recently secured $100 million in a Series C funding round led by GV, Google’s corporate venture wing. This latest funding brings Harvey’s total raised to $206 million and values the company at $1.5 billion. In a blog post, co-founders Winston Weinberg and Gabriel Pereyra revealed that the majority of the funds will be used to collect and curate data for training their domain-specific AI models. They also plan to expand their team and extend their paid services to new regions.
Weinberg, a former litigator, and Pereyra, a research scientist, founded Harvey in 2022 after Weinberg was introduced to OpenAI’s GPT-3 text-generating system by Pereyra. Recognizing the potential to enhance legal workflows, they developed Harvey using OpenAI’s GPT-4 model family. With this technology, Harvey can answer legal questions posed in natural language and offer various tools such as information extraction from trial transcripts, finding supporting legal documents, and generating draft filings with citations from legal databases.
However, there are concerns surrounding the use of AI in the legal field. Lawyers and law firms may be hesitant to grant access to confidential case documents, and there is a risk of AI models generating false or toxic information, which could be detrimental in a court of law. To address these concerns, Harvey includes a disclaimer stating that it is not intended to provide legal advice to non-lawyers and should only be used under the supervision of licensed attorneys.
Harvey faces competition from other AI-powered legal tools. Casetext uses AI to assist with legal research tasks and brief drafting, while Klarity focuses on contract review. There have even been attempts to leverage AI models to summarize legal notices for tenants. However, Weinberg and Pereyra assert that Harvey is gaining traction among law firms and consultancies, with tens of thousands of lawyers using the tool daily. They also reported a significant increase in annual recurring revenue and a tripling of their workforce since December.
Earlier reports suggested that Harvey planned to raise $600 million and acquire a legal research service called vLex to further train their AI products. However, these plans fell through, leading to the reduced Series C funding. Despite this setback, Harvey remains optimistic about its future in revolutionizing legal workflows with AI.
