Legal AI giant Harvey acquires Hexus as competition heats up in legal tech

Harvey, the high-flying ineligible AI startup, has acquired Hexus — a two-year-old startup that builds tools for creating merchandise demos, videos, and guides — arsenic the institution continues its assertive enlargement amid fierce contention successful the ineligible tech market.

Hexus laminitis and CEO Sakshi Pratap, who antecedently held engineering roles astatine Walmart, Oracle, and Google, tells TechCrunch that her San Francisco-based squad has already joined Harvey, portion the startup’s India-based engineers volition travel onboard erstwhile Harvey establishes a Bangalore office. Pratap adds that she volition pb an engineering squad focused connected accelerating Harvey’s offerings for in-house ineligible departments.

“What we’re bringing to Harvey is heavy acquisition gathering endeavor AI tools successful adjacent occupation spaces,” Pratap said. “This expertise helps Harvey determination faster successful a marketplace that’s becoming progressively competitive.”

Hexus had raised $1.6 cardinal from Pear VC, Liquid 2 Ventures, and angel investors earlier the acquisition. While Pratap declined to stock woody terms, she said the operation was aligned astir “long-term squad incentives.”

The acquisition comes arsenic Harvey looks to cement its presumption arsenic 1 of AI’s hottest startups. The institution confirmed past autumn that it’s present valued astatine $8 billion aft raising $160 million, bringing its backing crossed 2025 to $760 million. Andreessen Horowitz led that newest round, joined by caller investors T. Rowe Price and WndrCo, alongside existing backers Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Conviction, and angel capitalist Elad Gil. (It started the twelvemonth with a $3 cardinal valuation aft Sequoia led a $300 cardinal Series D circular successful the company.)

Harvey present claims much than 1,000 clients crossed 60 countries, including a bulk of the apical 10 U.S. instrumentality firms.

When TechCrunch spoke with co-founder and CEO Winston Weinberg successful November, helium traced Harvey’s root communicative backmost to a cold email sent to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Weinberg, past a first-year subordinate astatine O’Melveny & Myers, and co-founder Gabe Pereyra, a researcher who worked astatine Google DeepMind and Meta and was Weinberg’s roommate astatine the time, tested GPT-3 connected landlord-tenant instrumentality questions from Reddit. When they showed the AI-generated answers to attorneys, 2 retired of 3 said they’d nonstop 86 of 100 responses with zero edits.

“That was the infinitesimal erstwhile we were like, wow, this full manufacture tin beryllium transformed by this technology,” Weinberg said.

They emailed Altman connected July 4, 2022, got connected a telephone that aforesaid morning, and landed their archetypal cheque from the OpenAI Startup Fund soon after. According to Weinberg, the OpenAI Startup Fund remains Harvey’s second-largest investor.