On Thursday, Harvey confirmed it closed a new round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. This investment values the legal AI startup at $8 billion, following earlier reports of the funding in October. The startup raised $160 million in this round.
This latest capital infusion arrives just months after Harvey raised $300 million in a Series E round at a $5 billion valuation in June. That round itself followed shortly after a Sequoia-led $300 million Series D at a $3 billion valuation in February.
Harvey’s investors include EQT, WndrCo, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Sarah Guo’s Conviction, and Elad Gil. In September, just before this latest mega-round, Harvey shared some details about its business. While it declined to share absolute numbers initially, it later confirmed it had surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue back in August. The company said it counts 50 of the top AmLaw 100 firms as customers and also serves corporate legal teams.
As an industry entirely based on words, legal functions are a perfect use case for large language models, which excel at searching, summarizing, and drafting based on domain-specific training. Harvey also stands as a prime example of how venture capitalists are “kingmaking” today. This strategy involves pouring vast sums of money into a startup to signal its solidity, which in turn encourages large enterprise customers, like major law firms, to sign substantial contracts in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Founded in 2022, Harvey may now be far enough ahead of competitors—both in customer acquisition and in the reinforced training from working with so many law firms—that it is the king of this market. At least, one of its long-time investors, Elad Gil, thinks so. Gil stated that Harvey is one of the AI market leaders experiencing bona fide growth because its technology and market position are “just working.”
Harvey’s founder and CEO, Winston Weinberg, recently shared the incredible story of how the startup originally won over Silicon Valley’s powerhouse venture capitalists. It all began with a proof of concept focused on landlord-tenant law and a cold email to Sam Altman. Harvey became one of the OpenAI Startup Fund’s first investments and has been a VC darling ever since.