- Legal generative AI startup Harvey has raised a funding round from Sequoia, Insider has learned.
- This funding round landed the startup a $150 million post-money valuation.
- Despite its rich price tag, the startup serves relatively few customers, one source told Insider.
Industry-specific generative AI startups have emerged in nearly every industry, from healthcare to gaming, to offer specialized services beyond the capabilities of general models like OpenAI’s GPT-4.
One of the buzziest verticals for this technology has been law, which has seen the rise of up-and-comers like EvenUp, whose mission to offer AI to personal injury lawyers recently landed it a $350 million valuation from Bessemer Venture Partners, The Information reported.
Now, another hot startup in this legal AI space has scored millions of dollars in new funding and the backing of a top-tier VC to hopefully come out at the front of the pack.
Legal generative AI startup Harvey has raised a Series A round of funding at a $150 million post-money valuation from Sequoia Capital, according to three people with knowledge of the financing who were not authorized to speak publicly.
The Sequoia deal team was headed up by VC Pat Grady, known for previous successful investments in Notion, Hugging Face, and Attentive, four sources said.
Harvey and Sequoia Capital did not respond to a request for comment.
Harvey was founded in 2022 by Gabriel Pereyra, who previously held AI research positions at Meta, DeepMind, and Google Brain, and Winston Weinberg, a former antitrust and securities lawyer. Together, the two married their AI and legal expertise to launch the startup, which aims to help lawyers with their everyday workflows, from editing legal documents to performing legal research, through instructions and questions posed in natural language.
This isn’t the first time Harvey has received VC buzz — the upstart emerged from stealth in November last year with $5 million in funding as one of the first investments from OpenAI’s Startup Fund, as well as backing from Jeff Dean, the lead of Google AI, Elad Gil, and Sarah Guo.
Already, the startup has garnered significant interest from potential clients, with “a waitlist that seems to be stacked with prospects,” one source said.
However, that interest hasn’t necessarily panned out into actual customers. Currently, Harvey only has two customers, international law firm Allen & Overy and a consulting firm, although Allen & Overy has already bought $1 million in usage tokens, the source added. The law firm announced a partnership with Harvey in February, stating that 3,500 of its lawyers across 43 offices would be using the AI technology in their day-to-day work.
The relatively few customers makes Harvey’s valuation seem rich in comparison, the source said, pointing to a broader trend of elevated valuations and round sizes in the hyped-up generative AI space.
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