On April 26, 2023, Harvey announced a 21 million dollar Series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from the OpenAI Startup Fund, Conviction, SV Angel, and Elad Gil. The round followed an earlier 5 million dollar investment from the OpenAI Startup Fund in late 2022 and marked the early venture bet on building large-language-model tools specifically for the legal profession.
Harvey was founded in 2022 by Winston Weinberg, a former litigation associate, and Gabriel Pereyra, a former research scientist at DeepMind and machine-learning engineer at Meta AI. The company built domain-specific tools on GPT-4 to help lawyers carry out complex tasks, and it framed an unusually expansive ambition: “The future of AI will not be a chatbot that compliments your workflow; it will be the platform your workflow is built on.” The founders argued that large language models could “give knowledge workers superpowers by solving complex tasks efficiently and accurately.”
Harvey went on to raise much larger rounds as elite law firms adopted its tools, reaching a 3 billion dollar valuation by early 2025.
Why business readers should care: Harvey’s Series A is the starting point of one of the fastest-rising vertical-AI companies, and the backing from both a top venture firm and OpenAI’s own fund signaled early conviction that the biggest near-term value of GPT-4 lay in narrow, high-value professional workflows rather than general chat.