Harvey AI Acquires Hexus Amid Legal Tech Competition Surge
▼ Summary
– Harvey, a legal AI startup, has acquired the demo-tool startup Hexus to accelerate its expansion in the competitive legal tech market.
– Hexus’s founder and team are joining Harvey, with its founder leading an engineering team focused on tools for in-house legal departments.
– Harvey’s valuation has soared to $8 billion after raising $160 million, bringing its total 2025 funding to $760 million.
– The company now serves over 1,000 clients across 60 countries, including most top U.S. law firms.
– Harvey originated from a GPT-3 test on legal questions and secured early funding from the OpenAI Startup Fund after its founders cold-emailed Sam Altman.
The legal technology sector is witnessing a significant consolidation as Harvey, a prominent artificial intelligence startup focused on law, has completed the acquisition of Hexus. This strategic move aims to bolster Harvey’s product development capabilities, particularly for corporate legal teams, as competition intensifies in the rapidly evolving legal AI market. Hexus, a younger company specializing in software for creating product demonstrations and instructional content, brings its entire team into the Harvey fold.
Hexus founder and CEO Sakshi Pratap confirmed that her San Francisco-based staff has already transitioned to Harvey. Engineers located in India will join once Harvey establishes an official office in Bangalore. Pratap, who has held engineering positions at major firms like Google and Oracle, will now lead a team dedicated to accelerating the development of Harvey’s offerings for in-house legal departments. She emphasized that her team’s background in building enterprise AI tools for related challenges will help Harvey innovate more quickly.
“This expertise helps Harvey move faster in a market that’s becoming increasingly competitive,” Pratap stated.
Prior to the acquisition, Hexus had secured $1.6 million in funding from investors including Pear VC and Liquid 2 Ventures. While the specific financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, Pratap described the arrangement as being structured around long-term incentives for the team.
This acquisition occurs as Harvey solidifies its status as a top-tier AI startup. The company recently confirmed an $8 billion valuation following a $160 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. This latest investment, which included participation from T. Rowe Price and WndrCo alongside existing backers like Sequoia Capital, brings Harvey’s total funding for the year to $760 million. The company began the year valued at $3 billion after a separate funding round. Harvey now reports serving over 1,000 clients across 60 countries, which includes most of the top ten largest law firms in the United States.
Harvey’s origin story is rooted in a simple experiment. Co-founders Winston Weinberg, then a first-year lawyer, and Gabe Pereyra, a researcher from Google DeepMind and Meta, tested an early AI model on common legal questions found online. When they presented the AI-generated answers to practicing attorneys, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with many stating they would use the responses with no changes.
“That was the moment when we were like, wow, this entire industry can be transformed by this technology,” recalled Weinberg.
The pair sent a cold email to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on July 4, 2022, secured a meeting that same morning, and shortly thereafter received their first investment from the OpenAI Startup Fund, which remains one of Harvey’s largest investors today.
(Source: TechCrunch)
