Harvey is a startup building generative-AI tools for legal, tax, and finance professionals. It was founded by Winston Weinberg, an attorney with a background in antitrust and securities litigation, and Gabe Pereyra, an AI researcher who had worked on large language models at Google Brain and Meta. An early proof point came when the founders pulled landlord-tenant questions from Reddit’s r/legaladvice and used GPT-3 to draft answers: according to Weinberg, for 86 out of 100 questions, attorneys said they would have sent the answer to the client without editing.
In 2023 Harvey partnered with OpenAI to create a custom-trained case-law model, allowing it to handle tasks that require complex reasoning and extensive domain knowledge - drafting documents, answering questions about complicated litigation scenarios, and finding discrepancies across hundreds of contracts. OpenAI’s announcement described Harvey as having grown to a team of over 100 people, increased revenue more than tenfold in 2023, and raised $80 million in Series B funding at a $715 million valuation. The global law firm Allen & Overy was an early launch partner, deploying Harvey across its lawyers.
Harvey became one of the most visible names in the wave of “legal LLM” companies that followed ChatGPT, alongside tools like Casetext’s CoCounsel. Its pitch was not to replace lawyers but to let them spend less time sifting and drafting and more time on judgment and client work.
Why business readers should care: Harvey is a template for the vertical-AI startup - take a frontier model, fine-tune it on a profession’s documents and workflows, and sell it into firms that bill by the hour and are acutely sensitive to errors. Its trajectory shows both the speed of adoption in professional services and the central role of trust and accuracy in winning that market.