A startup that builds AI "co-pilots" for lawyersHarveyIn the latest roundFinancingThe company has raised $100 million in a round of financing, and its valuation has reached $1.5 billion. This round of financing was led by Google's corporate venture capital department GV, and well-known institutions such as OpenAI, Kleiner Perkins, and Sequoia Capital also participated. It seems that the application of AI in the legal field is being enthusiastically sought after by the capital market!
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Harvey’s co-founders, Winston Weinberg and Gabriel Pereira, said the new capital will be used in three main areas:
Collect and manage data for building and training domain-specific AI models
Expanding the size of the company team
Expanding paid services to new regions
What is the core function of Harvey? It is based on OpenAI's GPT-4 model and can answer legal questions expressed in natural language, such as explaining the difference between legal clauses, or checking whether a lease is illegal and providing modification suggestions. In addition, Harvey can automatically extract information from trial records, find documents supporting court arguments, and even generate a draft document containing legal citations.
However, Harvey's use also faces some challenges. Due to the sensitivity of legal cases, some lawyers and law firms may have concerns about allowing AI tools to access case files. Moreover, AI models sometimes generate false information, which may have serious consequences in court. Therefore, Harvey specifically emphasizes that it should be used under the supervision of a licensed attorney, rather than providing legal advice to non-professionals.
Harvey is not the only one in the market. Casetext, Klarity and other companies are also developing similar AI legal tools. But Harvey claims that they have strong momentum and tens of thousands of lawyers are using their products, including some well-known law firms and consulting companies.
Nevertheless, Harvey's financing plan seems to have experienced some twists and turns. According to reports, they originally planned to raise $600 million at a valuation of $2 billion, partly for the acquisition of a legal research services company. However, this ambitious plan ultimately failed to materialize, resulting in a significant reduction in the size of this round of financing.