Harvey co-founders Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra.
Courtesy of Harvey
With OpenAI and Anthropic soaring to a combined valuation of more than $1 trillion, some in the artificial intelligence industry fear that the two big model companies are sucking up so much of the value that there won’t be much left for other startups.
Harvey would like a word. On Wednesday, the legal AI company announced it’s raised $200 million in fresh capital at a valuation of $11 billion. The company is among a growing crop of startups focused on deploying the latest AI technology in specialized and complex markets.
Founded in 2022, Harvey offers AI tools for legal and professional services that can streamline contract analysis, compliance, due diligence and litigation. The company’s products are used by more than 100,000 lawyers across 1,300 organizations, according to a release.
Singapore’s GIC and Sequoia led the financing, which closed just months after Harvey raised funds at an $8 billion valuation in December. Sequoia has now led three of Harvey’s funding rounds, “the ultimate sign of conviction,” according to Pat Grady, a partner at the venture firm.
“They sort of wrote the playbook for what it means to be an AI-native application company, which is the same thing Salesforce did back in the day with the cloud transition,” Grady told CNBC in an interview.
Grady said that because model capabilities are improving so quickly, trying to apply them in real-world situations is a bigger undertaking than it has been for software companies in the past. There’s a lot of craft, taste and judgment that goes into determining how to use AI to achieve a particular job, he said.
Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg is a former lawyer who co-founded the startup with Gabe Pereyra, a former research scientist at Google DeepMind and Meta. The pair launched the company after experimenting with OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, which came out before ChatGPT.
Clients include global law firms and large enterprises like NBCUniversal and HSBC. The company hit $190 million in annual recurring revenue in January, up from the $100 million figure it announced in August. It also earned a spot on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list.
Harvey becomes the latest AI startup to cross the $10 billion valuation mark. In addition to OpenAI and Anthropic, that list includes Perplexity and Bret Taylor’s Sierra, among others. Weinberg said Harvey doesn’t pay much attention to those milestones.
“I think any company right now, the worst mistake you can possibly do is become complacent, because how you build a company is completely changing,” Weinberg said in an interview. “The companies that succeed are going to be the ones that are relentlessly adapting.”
Weinberg said Harvey will use the fresh capital to expand its AI agents, which are tools that can independently complete tasks on a user’s behalf. The company will also grow its embedded legal engineering teams around the world.
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