Harvey, a fast-growing legal AI startup, has acquired Hexus as it continues to aggressively expand in the fiercely competitive legal tech market. Hexus is a two-year-old startup that develops tools to create product demos, videos, and guides.
Hexus founder and CEO Sakshi Pratap, who previously held engineering roles at Walmart, Oracle and Google, told TechCrunch that her San Francisco-based team has already joined Harvey, while the startup’s India-based engineers will join once Harvey opens an office in Bangalore. Pratap added that he will lead an engineering team focused on accelerating Harvey’s services for the in-house legal department.
“What we bring to Harvey is deep experience building enterprise AI tools in adjacent problem areas,” said Pratap. “This expertise will help Harvey move faster in an increasingly competitive market.”
Prior to the acquisition, Hexus had raised $1.6 million from Pear VC, Liquid 2 Ventures, and angel investors. Pratap declined to divulge the terms of the deal, but said the structure was tailored around “long-term team incentives.”
The acquisition comes as Harvey seeks to solidify its position as one of the hottest startups in the AI space. Last fall, the company raised $160 million, confirmed its current valuation at $8 billion, and announced that it would raise $760 million through 2025. Andreessen Horowitz led the latest round, with participation from existing backers Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Conviction, angel investor Elad Gil, and new investors T. Rowe Price and WndrCo. (It was valued at $3 billion at the beginning of the year after Sequoia led a $300 million Series D round in the company.)
Harvey currently claims to have more than 1,000 clients in 60 countries, including most of the top 10 U.S. law firms.
When TechCrunch spoke with co-founder and CEO Winston Weinberg in November, he traced Harvey’s origins to a cold email he sent OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Weinberg, then a first-year employee at O’Melveny & Myers, and co-founder Gabe Pereira, a researcher who worked at Google DeepMind and Meta and Weinberg’s roommate at the time, tested GPT-3 on landlord-tenant law questions submitted by Reddit. When lawyers were shown the AI-generated answers, two out of three said they would send 86 out of 100 without editing.
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“That was the moment I thought, wow, this whole industry can be transformed by this technology,” Weinberg said.
They emailed Altman on July 4, 2022, received a call that morning, and received their first check from OpenAI Startup Fund shortly after. Weinberg said OpenAI Startup Fund remains Harvey’s second-largest investor.
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