Harvey, a startup that provides artificial intelligence tools for lawyers, is reportedly seeking to raise $100 million in funding. 

The Information today cited sources as saying that Alphabet Inc.’s GV fund is expected to lead the round. The investment is reportedly set to value Harvey at $1.5 billion, about twice what it was worth following a $80 million raise last December. That latter deal included the participation of the OpenAI Startup Fund.

The $100 million that Harvey is currently working to raise was originally envisioned as a $600 million investment, according to The Information. The company hoped to use the additional capital to acquire vLEX, a company with a searchable repository of legislation, court cases and other legal documents. The plan was to use vLEX’s dataset to enhance Harvey’s AI models.

The company reportedly cut its fundraising target to $100 million after the acquisition fell through. The $1.5 billion valuation sought by Harvey, in turn, is believed to be $500 million lower than the sum it originally hoped for.

Harvey, officially Counsel AI Corp., was launched in 2022 by former DeepMind researcher Gabriel Pereyra and attorney Winston Weinberg. It provides a suite of AI tools designed to make legal teams more productive. 

One of the products can automatically extract key information from trial transcripts. Another tool, dubbed Assistant, helps legal teams more quickly answer clients’ legal questions by generating first drafts. Harvey says that the software can incorporate information from dozens of legal documents into the responses it generates.

A third product from the company saves time for litigation teams by automatically finding legal documents that can back up their court arguments. According to the company, its AI draws on not only past cases but also regulatory filings and other records. The tool includes citations in each response to help attorneys quickly find the source documents.

Under the hood, Harvey’s software is powered in part by a customized large language model from OpenAI. According to the companies, the AI can generate longer, more comprehensive answers to legal questions than GPT-4. It’s also less prone to hallucinations. 

It’s unclear how the company plans to spend the capital. One possibility is that Harvey will seek to expand its partnership with OpenAI.

Last year, the ChatGPT developer launched a program that allows companies to commission custom versions of GPT-4. This past May, in turn, it revealed that its engineers had begun training the successor to GPT-4. Using the funding round currently in the works, Harvey might upgrade the custom OpenAI model that powers its software to a more advanced version based on the ChatGPT developer’s next-generation LLM.

Photo: Harvey