Latest news with #WinstonWeinberg
Yahoo
23-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Harvey raises $300 million at $5 billion valuation to be legal AI for lawyers worldwide
Happy Monday. It's Alexandra Sternlicht subbing for Allie. Today, we're sharing news that legal LLM Harvey raised a $300 million Series E at a $5 billion valuation. The company, which sells lawyers AI solutions, lists large law firm customers like Paul, Weiss as well as in-house legal departments at major corporations, including KKR and PwC. With the fresh funding, Harvey plans to double its headcount to expand its global presence and diversity into new professional services like tax accounting. 'If you expand as quickly as we are, you just need to do raises like this,' says Winston Weinberg, who is the company's CEO, cofounder and a lawyer. Though Harvey is only about three years old, it has clients in 53 countries and boasts a 340-plus person headcount. The Series E is co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue. It counts Sequoia, GV, DST Global, Conviction, Elad Gil, Open AI Startup Fund, Elemental, SV Angel, Kris Fredrickson and REV (the VC group LexisNexis owner RELX Group) as participants. On Friday, I had the pleasure of visiting Harvey's swanky Park Avenue NYC headquarters. And it was filled with lawyers. Lawyers in the kitchen. Lawyers spinning in ergonomic chairs. Lawyers smiling and waving at me. Though CEO Weinberg notes that the lawyer-workforce is unique to the company's New York office, and that only 18% of its headcount is lawyers, he believes that these attorney-employees are essential to achieve Harvey's goal of 'partnering' with the industry. So far the strategy is working: Harvey boasts 337 legal clients. Long before OpenAI released its first ChatGPT bot, entrepreneurs have been trying to make AI lawyers a thing. These companies have largely failed. Harvey, by its investors' accounts, is not failing. 'We've seen the company perform incredibly well across all facets,' Kleiner Perkins' partner Ilya Fushman, who co-led this round as well as Harvey's Series B and participated in its C and D, tells me. 'It sets the blueprint for how a vertical AI enterprise company can build and execute.' Still, Harvey is just one solution in the crowded field of AI lawyers that aim to disrupt the $1 trillion legal market. Though it could be meaningless in the long-run, with this funding, Harvey has nabbed the highest public valuation of any legal AI startup. Competitors Ironclad raised a 2022 Series E at a $3.2 billion valuation and Clio raised a 2024 $900 million Series F at a $3 billion valuation. Harvey's technology is built atop leading large language models—OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and so on—and combined with data and work flows designed for and by lawyers. It also customizes its models on firm-specific data by feeding the tech proprietary documents that remain private to the firm. While the security and privacy of client data is obviously critical in legal matters, Harvey says it meets industry-recognized security standards, engages in regular third-party testing, and maintains that over 10% of its organization is security professionals. Juan Pablo Sandoval Celis, a lawyer/MBA, who works on the company's business development team says that customers have used Harvey to reduce legal processes from weeks to minutes. Of course, law firms make money from hours billed to clients. So lawyers finding efficiencies with Harvey could lead to an enormous revenue loss for these law firms. Weinberg notes that certain legal work is increasingly billed via fixed fee, though certain specialized work will forever be billed hourly. He also believes that widespread use of AI will increase work for lawyers. Says Weinberg, 'I think it'll get to a certain point where you aren't able to compete—or able to support large corporations—unless you are using tools like this.' See you tomorrow, Alexandra SternlichtX: @iamsternlichtEmail: a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here. Nina Ajemian curated the deals section of today's newsletter. Subscribe here. This story was originally featured on Sign in to access your portfolio
CNBC
10-06-2025
- Business
- CNBC
32. Harvey
Founders: Winston Weinberg (CEO), Gabe PereryaLaunched: 2022Headquarters: San FranciscoFunding: $500 millionValuation: $3 billionKey Technologies: Artificial intelligence, generative AIIndustry: Enterprise technology, legal servicesPrevious appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 0 In law firms, young associates are expected to grind through endless hours of research and document review. Harvey, an AI-powered legal technology company, offers an alternative: automation that frees up associates to focus on strategy. The three-year-old startup is part of a new wave of AI companies targeting professional services and reshaping knowledge work. Founded by a former lawyer and a Google AI researcher, Harvey builds large language models tailored for legal and compliance work. Its software handles tasks like analyzing and drafting contracts, due diligence, litigation support, and compliance workflows. It's caught on with some of the world's largest companies and law firms. Harvey has more than 250 enterprise customers in 43 countries, including A&O Shearman, Verizon and PwC. In September 2024, it announced a collaboration with PwC to co-build the Tax AI Assistant, a suite of models trained on curated tax data and refined with feedback from PwC's own experts. The partnership highlights Harvey's strategy of working closely with firms to tailor its models. Despite the fear of AI replacing knowledge workers, Harvey's CEO and co-founder Winston Weinberg, a former lawyer himself, says Harvey aids lawyers but doesn't replace them. "It's not job displacement, it's task displacement," he said on the "No Priors" podcast. "Getting rid of those tasks doesn't mean the legal industry falls apart. It evolves." Investors have taken notice. The company raised $300 million in February in a Series D round that valued the company at $3 billion. Investors included Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, GV, Elad Gil, Conviction and fellow Disruptor OpenAI's startup fund. The round followed soon after a $100 million fundraising last July, and Reuters recently reported that the company is in talks to raise another $250 million at a higher valuation. Meanwhile, the company continues to add new features. It launched a new version of its Vault storage, search and insights product in November, hired a CFO in March, and opened a London office in September to support growing international demand. Harvey is betting that law firms and professional services companies will continue to embrace AI that trims the busywork and enhances their highest-value output. The billable hour may not be dead, but how those hours are spent is starting to change.
Business Insider
13-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
What Harvey is doing to win the legal AI race it inadvertently started
Legal tech was long a space that investors ignored. Then came Harvey. In just three years, the company, which builds software for analyzing and drafting documents using legally tuned large language models, has drawn blue-chip law firms, Silicon Valley investors, and a stampede of rivals hoping to catch its momentum. Harvey has raised over half a billion dollars in capital, sending its valuation soaring to $3 billion. On a recent Monday afternoon at Harvey's Manhattan office, I met cofounder and chief executive Winston Weinberg in a polished conference room named for Atticus Finch, a beloved character from the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird." I mentioned that since I started covering legal tech a month ago, my inbox has been flooded with pitches from legal-tech startups eager to explain how they're not Harvey. Weinberg let out a soft chuckle. "I'll take that as a compliment, I guess." In recent years, more competition has been encroaching on Harvey's territory, and fast. Hebbia, a knowledge-search platform, has made a more focused push into the legal sector, and Legora, which offers an AI-powered workspace where lawyers can draft, edit, and collaborate, is gaining traction with Harvey's core clientele of Big Law firms. While legal tech was once the domain of ex-lawyers building tools for their peers, now it's attracting classically trained software engineers, eager to compete in a space without a staid market leader. Harvey may have cracked the market open, but now it faces the classic innovator's dilemma: the very proof of concept it offered to the legal world is fueling a growing list of competitors. The legal-tech land grab is on. The question is whether Harvey can maintain its first-mover advantage, or if it's simply cleared the path for the next breakout. Want in? Get in line. Part of what fueled Harvey's ascent is its go-to-market strategy. Early on, the company bet that winning over the country's most elite law firms would create a ripple effect across the industry. It gated access to the product using a waitlist, allowing it to tightly tailor the tool to pilot users. So far, its Big Law wager appears to be paying off. Weinberg said lawyers at eight of the 10 highest-grossing firms in the nation are now using Harvey. The company tells Business Insider it crossed $70 million in annual recurring revenue last quarter, putting it on pace to smash its goal of $100 million ARR for the year. "Once a subset of the market standardizes on a solution, it's kind of the solution," said Ilya Fushman, a venture capitalist who led Kleiner Perkins' investment in Harvey in 2023. Leaning forward in a high-back, caramel-colored leather chair, Weinberg seemed unfazed by the growing competition. Harvey's edge, he argued, lies in two places its rivals can't easily replicate: top-tier talent and a product strategy built on deep collaboration with its customers. The 260-person startup has lured dozens of trained lawyers off the gilded path to Big Law partnership, offering stock options and a shot at shaping the future of legal practice. To keep its edge, Harvey just made a key hire. Stripe veteran John Haddock has joined as chief business officer after a decade scaling one of Silicon Valley's most closely watched startups. Haddock told BI he spoke to dozens of Harvey customers before accepting an offer. His decision boiled down to their love of the product. He called it Weinberg's "No. 1 maniacal focus." "The best thing we can do is stay focused on: are we building stuff that lawyers really need and need every day?" he said. "Everything else takes care of itself." Harvey goes multi-model Harvey has been fighting the competition with one hand tied behind its back. Since its founding, the company has partnered closely with OpenAI to build custom models for lawyers. Its entire product ran on OpenAI's models. It's a limitation that Harvey's rivals have been quick to point out. They argue their products are superior because they can cherry-pick from the best of Anthropic, Meta, or Google, depending on the task. Now, Harvey wants to neutralize that criticism. The company tells BI it's going multi-model, starting with Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini. Weinberg said Harvey didn't avoid other models out of loyalty to OpenAI, but necessity. Until recently, most major law firms would only approve AI tools that ran through Microsoft Azure, which meant models like Claude and Gemini couldn't clear security reviews. Those constraints are falling away as vendors like Anthropic build the features enterprises demand and gain clout. The move may also suggest Harvey is adapting to a clientele that's perhaps more opinionated about which models power their tools, especially as rivals pitch flexibility as a selling point. Harvey's secret sauce In a market where model performance offers marginal gains, Harvey is betting that its true edge lies in how deeply the product molds to the client. "What I think is closer to a traditional moat," Weinberg said, "is we are very focused on customization, massively." The company partners directly with firms to build bespoke legal workflow software. With A&O Shearman, for example, Harvey helped develop a merger control tool that taps the firm's global antitrust bench. For another client focused on private equity, the company built out deal-specific workflows. Lawyers across those firms are using the tools, and the firms are selling that customized software to clients and other law firms, sharing a cut of the revenue with Harvey. If customization is the moat, the obvious question becomes: how does it scale? One investor in a Harvey competitor asked at what point the company becomes overrun with service requests and support tickets. The company's bet is that it can turn workflows from custom projects into reusable building blocks — a sort of Lego kit it can adapt for each new client. It's a bold strategy, but in a crowded field, Weinberg believes that winning won't come from better answers. It'll come from building a system that grows with the people asking the questions. "At the end of the day," he said, "what you want to do is build a solution that tracks the evolution of law over time."
Yahoo
06-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Hottest AI Companies Right Now Are ‘Apps'
(Bloomberg) -- Not long ago, Silicon Valley was dismissive of startups like Harvey. While OpenAI developed cutting-edge artificial intelligence models with the potential to shake up almost every industry, Harvey had a more modest goal: building software that makes OpenAI's technology more useful for lawyers. 'The market's perception of companies like us… was that they're GPT wrappers,' said Harvey Chief Executive Officer Winston Weinberg, referencing a derisive term used to suggest the repackaging of OpenAI's models. If investors 'were going to put money into something,' he added, 'it needed to be into OpenAI or Anthropic.'Today, so-called AI wrappers are all the rage. Step into any venture capital office in Silicon Valley and you'll hear investors buzzing about startups that offer AI chatbots, research tools and other software applications for coding, clinicians and customer service, all built at least in part on the backs of large language models (LLMs) created by other leading AI startups are seeing revenue and valuations grow at a fast clip, often while spending a fraction of the amount that top AI model developers do on chips, data centers and talent. Harvey, founded in 2022, surpassed $50 million in annual recurring revenue in December, Weinberg said. Likewise, Anysphere, the startup behind the popular code-editing tool, Cursor, has hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private information. (Anysphere did not respond to a request for comment.)Michael Mignano, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, likens this moment in AI to the original smartphone app boom nearly two decades ago. 'Just like after the iPhone launched, there were millions of new mobile apps,' said Mignano, an investor in the AI notetaking service Granola, which uses technology from OpenAI and Anthropic. 'Now with AI and LLMs, there will be millions of new AI products.' Trump Administration Plans to Eliminate Dozens of Housing Offices Republican Mayor Braces for Tariffs: 'We Didn't Budget for This' How Upzoning in Cambridge Broke the YIMBY Mold NYC's Finances Are Sinking With Gauge Falling to 11-Year Low How Sanctuary Cities Are Fighting Trump, Again Investors are eager to put their money into these services. Harvey raised a $300 million round earlier this year led by Sequoia at a $3 billion valuation. Anysphere raised a $105 million round led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz in January valuing it at $2.5 billion. And VC demand is so high that founders like Varun Mohan say the conventional fundraising process 'isn't something we have to do.'Mohan's company, Codeium, which also offers an AI tool for coders, is currently raising money at a valuation near $3 billion in a round led by Kleiner Perkins, according to a person familiar with the matter. (TechCrunch earlier reported Codeium's fundraising. Kleiner Perkins did not respond to a request for comment.)Certainly, VC appetite remains strong for OpenAI and Anthropic, as evidenced by their recent megarounds. But backing these richly valued companies is getting too costly for some firms. Investors have also begun to question the wisdom of AI companies pouring billions into developing models in the wake of DeepSeek, a Chinese upstart that claims to have built a competitive option for just $5.6 million. And several notable model makers have shifted away from the race to build more advanced AI systems or been partially absorbed by Big Tech firms, raising fears of more consolidation to come.'At this point, it's very clear that the apps are definitely the best place to invest because that is where the revenue is, that is where the customers are,' said Jesse Zhang, CEO of Decagon, a startup that builds AI customer support agents in part by using models from OpenAI and Anthropic. 'The models will get better and better, and cheaper,' he added, and the apps will benefit the most from those improvements.A New GenerationPerhaps no company embodies the promise of the AI app era like Anysphere. Founded in 2022 by four friends who met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and had little more than intern-level job experience, Anysphere has seen soaring growth for its AI-powered code editor, investors claim it's the fastest-growing software startup of all time, a title previously held by Wiz, a cloud security company that reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue in only 18 months. Anysphere hit that in just 12 months, according to people familiar with the on a mix of LLMs from other providers, Anysphere has built a coding tool that developers say saves them time — and it's won a cult following of engineers and tech elites willing to pay for the service. Coinbase Global Inc. CEO Brian Armstrong wrote on X that 100% of his company's coders use Cursor.'There is a new generation of brilliant engineers who know how to use this new computing paradigm to reinvent product experiences,' said Miles Grimshaw, a Thrive Capital general partner and investor in Anysphere. Despite the company's rapid growth, Anysphere currently has about 40 employees. Here, too, there are echoes of early smartphone app successes like Instagram, which gained traction in Silicon Valley with a very lean staff. While AI application companies promise investors efficiency, some are also gearing up to grow quickly. Anysphere plans to expand headcount this year. Harvey has also grown to 260 employees and plans to use some of its funding to double headcount this year. The rapid expansion comes with challenges. Like the founders at Anysphere, Weinberg had little experience before launching Harvey, beyond briefly working as a lawyer himself. 'I've never done this before. I'm not gonna lie about that,' he said. 'It's about figuring out how to scale — not just as a company, but yourself.'The tremendous amount of capital available to these companies may also be a mixed blessing. 'I don't think it's a good idea to raise money just because it's there,' said Shiv Rao, CEO of Abridge AI Inc., an AI platform for clinical conversations that has raised $400 million in the past year. 'That can cause acid reflux pretty quickly for startups if they're not really the biggest concern likely remains that OpenAI or another top LLM developer will one day decide to compete directly with these services, just as Apple Inc. has cloned popular apps on its own App Store, and Meta Platforms Inc. has upended small apps through minor software updates. For now, VCs are optimistic. Lightspeed's Mignano said it would be 'naïve' for people 'to think that these large language providers are going to build verticalized apps for every single possible use case.' Instead, bringing AI to every industry, from law to medicine, may fall to a small army of startups. Snack Makers Are Removing Fake Colors From Processed Foods The Mysterious Billionaire Behind the World's Most Popular Vapes Rich People Are Firing a Cash Cannon at the US Economy—But at What Cost? Greenland Voters Weigh Their Election's Most Important Issue: Trump An All-American Finance Empire Drew Billions—and a Regulator's Attention ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Sign in to access your portfolio
Bloomberg
06-03-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
The Hottest AI Companies Right Now Are ‘Apps'
Not long ago, Silicon Valley was dismissive of startups like Harvey. While OpenAI developed cutting-edge artificial intelligence models with the potential to shake up almost every industry, Harvey had a more modest goal: building software that makes OpenAI's technology more useful for lawyers. 'The market's perception of companies like us… was that they're GPT wrappers,' said Harvey Chief Executive Officer Winston Weinberg, referencing a derisive term used to suggest the repackaging of OpenAI's models. If investors 'were going to put money into something,' he added, 'it needed to be into OpenAI or Anthropic.' Today, so-called AI wrappers are all the rage. Step into any venture capital office in Silicon Valley and you'll hear investors buzzing about startups that offer AI chatbots, research tools and other software applications for coding, clinicians and customer service, all built at least in part on the backs of large language models (LLMs) created by other leading AI developers. These startups are seeing revenue and valuations grow at a fast clip, often while spending a fraction of the amount that top AI model developers do on chips, data centers and talent. Harvey, founded in 2022, surpassed $50 million in annual recurring revenue in December, Weinberg said. Likewise, Anysphere, the startup behind the popular code-editing tool, Cursor, has hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private information. (Anysphere did not respond to a request for comment.) Michael Mignano, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, likens this moment in AI to the original smartphone app boom nearly two decades ago. 'Just like after the iPhone launched, there were millions of new mobile apps,' said Mignano, an investor in the AI notetaking service Granola, which uses technology from OpenAI and Anthropic. 'Now with AI and LLMs, there will be millions of new AI products.' Investors are eager to put their money into these services. Harvey raised a $300 million round earlier this year led by Sequoia at a $3 billion valuation. Anysphere raised a $105 million round led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz in January valuing it at $2.5 billion. And VC demand is so high that founders like Varun Mohan say the conventional fundraising process 'isn't something we have to do.' Mohan's company, Codeium, which also offers an AI tool for coders, is currently raising money at a valuation near $3 billion in a round led by Kleiner Perkins, according to a person familiar with the matter. (TechCrunch earlier reported Codeium's fundraising. Kleiner Perkins did not respond to a request for comment.) Certainly, VC appetite remains strong for OpenAI and Anthropic, as evidenced by their recent megarounds. But backing these richly valued companies is getting too costly for some firms. Investors have also begun to question the wisdom of AI companies pouring billions into developing models in the wake of DeepSeek, a Chinese upstart that claims to have built a competitive option for just $5.6 million. And several notable model makers have shifted away from the race to build more advanced AI systems or been partially absorbed by Big Tech firms, raising fears of more consolidation to come. 'At this point, it's very clear that the apps are definitely the best place to invest because that is where the revenue is, that is where the customers are,' said Jesse Zhang, CEO of Decagon, a startup that builds AI customer support agents in part by using models from OpenAI and Anthropic. 'The models will get better and better, and cheaper,' he added, and the apps will benefit the most from those improvements. A New Generation Perhaps no company embodies the promise of the AI app era like Anysphere. Founded in 2022 by four friends who met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and had little more than intern-level job experience, Anysphere has seen soaring growth for its AI-powered code editor, Cursor. Anysphere's investors claim it's the fastest-growing software startup of all time, a title previously held by Wiz, a cloud security company that reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue in only 18 months. Anysphere hit that in just 12 months, according to people familiar with the matter. Leaning on a mix of LLMs from other providers, Anysphere has built a coding tool that developers say saves them time — and it's won a cult following of engineers and tech elites willing to pay for the service. Coinbase Global Inc. CEO Brian Armstrong wrote on X that 100% of his company's coders use Cursor. 'There is a new generation of brilliant engineers who know how to use this new computing paradigm to reinvent product experiences,' said Miles Grimshaw, a Thrive Capital general partner and investor in Anysphere. Despite the company's rapid growth, Anysphere currently has about 40 employees. Here, too, there are echoes of early smartphone app successes like Instagram, which gained traction in Silicon Valley with a very lean staff.
