Startup company Harvey, dedicated to creating an AI "copilot" for lawyers, has raised $100 million in its latest round of funding, with a valuation now reaching $1.5 billion. This round of financing was led by GV, Google's corporate venture capital department, with participation from renowned institutions such as OpenAI, Kleiner Perkins, and Sequoia Capital. It seems that the application of AI in the legal field is receiving enthusiastic pursuit from the capital market!
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Winston Weinberg and Gabriel Pereira, the co-founders of Harvey, stated that the new funds will be primarily used in three areas:
Collecting and managing data for constructing and training AI models in specific domains
Expanding the company's team size
Extending 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 differences between legal clauses or checking whether a lease is illegal and providing suggestions for revision. Additionally, Harvey can automatically extract information from trial records, find documents supporting court arguments, and even generate draft documents containing legal citations.
However, the use of Harvey also faces some challenges. Due to the sensitivity of legal cases, some lawyers and law firms may be hesitant to allow AI tools to access case files. Moreover, AI models sometimes produce incorrect information, which can have serious consequences in court. Therefore, Harvey emphasizes that it should be used under the supervision of licensed lawyers, not to provide legal advice to non-professionals.
Harvey is not the only player in the market. Companies like Casetext and Klarity are also developing similar AI legal tools. But Harvey claims they are gaining strong momentum, with tens of thousands of lawyers using their products, including some well-known law firms and consulting companies.
Despite this, Harvey's financing plan seems to have experienced some setbacks. Reports indicate that they originally planned to raise $600 million at a valuation of $2 billion, partly for the acquisition of a legal research service company. However, this ambitious plan ultimately failed to materialize, resulting in a significant reduction in the scale of this round of financing.