Harvey
AI for Legal
In August 2022, when we first met with Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra, we were struck by a few different things: their work ethic, their confidence in AI capability expansion, their extreme ambition for how AI could reshape the legal industry, and their grounded, customer-centric approach to realizing that potential. As investors, we aspire to identify those rare companies who balance unreasonableness about what is possible with AI and clarity about how to get there. Both are required to reshape industries. In Winston and Gabe, we saw the embodiment of that aspiration. The Harvey seed was the first check in our first fund at Conviction.
The text-driven legal sector represents a huge opportunity for AI-driven change. Each generated token, if of sufficiently high quality, is worth its weight in gold. This sector is also one fraught with unique challenges given the high stakes nature of the work, conservative users, and deep institutional norms. Over the past three years, it’s been remarkable to witness Harvey’s growth from two guys in a dorm room to a trusted partner to the most prestigious law firms worldwide.
With over 250 clients today and on path to $100M of ARR, Harvey now has massive momentum. At a time when the industry was wringing its hands about whether the value of the application layer and whether “GPT wrappers” could create or capture any value, the Harvey team rolled up their sleeves, talked to users, and went to work. They thought about Minimum Viable Quality (MVQ), where to get the data (public and private) that would improve outputs, how to decompose sophisticated work into doable and verifiable tasks, and how to orchestrate those tasks into a seamless experience for a non-technical end user that just wants to file an S4. From building a specialized copilot, to the surrounding software, collaboration layer, and infrastructure, and then, as Winston puts it, constantly both “expanding task scope and collapsing complexity,” Harvey does more and more legal work every week.
Harvey is a first-of-its-kind company. It is building a map for a new generation of AI application companies, from product strategy, to how to build trust with customers making the AI transition, to enabling a team of domain experts, researchers and engineers in a dynamic technical environment. We’re still working on all of these, and other new challenges. But the muscle is there for reasoning from first principles about how to build a company in a fertile but entirely unknown terrain, and getting better every day. One of the company’s core principles is “decisiveness” — specifically when you have incomplete information, because the speed of iteration is what will get you to the right answer in today’s environment, and build the intuition for being right.
Empowering professional services firms and enterprises to realize the full potential of AI will require continued product execution, obsession with technical advancements, challenging company scaling, and navigation of thorny incentive structures and change management challenges. None of this is easy. One of the company’s core cultural principles is “job’s not finished.” The most fun jobs are the big, hard ones, the ones without end. Rarely do you even see an opportunity this large. If the past two and a half years are any indication, Harvey has the team, strategic clarity, and depth of conviction to meet the moment. As the company charts its next chapter, we at Conviction could not be more excited to continue supporting them in thoughtfully advancing the frontier.
Congratulations to the team on their $300M Series D, with our partners at Sequoia, Coatue, RelX, Kleiner, GV, Elad Gil Fund, and OpenAI. We’re hiring high-agency engineers (and beyond).