Investment: Harvey raises $21m Series A and Dori comes ‘out of stealth mode’ with $2m seed raise

Generative AI startup Harvey has raised a $21M Series A led by Sequoia with participation from the OpenAI Startup Fund, Conviction, SV Angel and Elad Gil. This follows $5m of investment from the OpenAI Startup Fund in November. 

Founded in 2022, Harvey hit the headlines in earnest in the legal sector earlier this year, when magic circle law firm Allen & Overy announced that it is partnering with the San Francisco-headquartered company.  

In a blog post announcing the $21m investment, Harvey, which was founded by Winston Weinberg, a former securities and antitrust litigator at O’Melveny & Myers, and Gabriel Pereyra, formerly a research scientist at DeepMind, said: “GPT-4 marks a shift in how professional services will be provided and consumed. Large language models have the potential to give knowledge workers superpowers by solving complex tasks efficiently and accurately. The best part: these solutions don’t leave knowledge workers without work; they allow them to focus on the quintessential aspects of their professions—strategy, advice, and judgment—the exact work that makes the long hours, in school and at the job, worthwhile.” 

You can read that post in full below.  

Also announcing funding yesterday was Dori, a generative AI platform for private market transactions, which came out of stealth mode and announced $2M in seed funding, with participation from Counterpart Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Service Provider Capital, as well as a number of prominent corporate attorneys.  

Yesterday’s announcement includes three product launches for venture capital transactions. The first is a convertible instrument platform to help startups fundraise. The second is preferred stock financing automation, which uses large language models similar to GPT-4 to automate the generation of venture equity financing deals. And the third is investment summarisation and insights, which read, analyse, and summarise the legal and economic terms in preferred stock financing documents.   

“We’ve trained our generative AI models on thousands of venture financing documents to provide high-quality, market standard documents in minutes,” said Sarosh Shahbuddin, CEO and co-founder of Dori. “By having access to both historical trends as well as real-time deals, we can provide unique insights into market conditions so attorneys, founders and investors can make informed decisions and reduce the time it takes to analyze, draft and negotiate these transactions.” Sign up to see how Dori can simplify fundraising by clicking here. 

Harvey’s blog is here:  

We are thrilled to announce our $21M Series A led by Sequoia with participation from the OpenAI Startup Fund, Conviction, SV Angel and Elad Gil. 

GPT-4 marks a shift in how professional services will be provided and consumed. Large language models have the potential to give knowledge workers superpowers by solving complex tasks efficiently and accurately. The best part: these solutions don’t leave knowledge workers without work; they allow them to focus on the quintessential aspects of their professions—strategy, advice, and judgment—the exact work that makes the long hours, in school and at the job, worthwhile. 

At Harvey, we believe that the future of AI will not be a chatbot that compliments your workflow; it will be the platform your workflow is built on. This is why we partner with entire firms. These close collaborations allow us to find solutions for lawyers that go beyond training data and treatises. You can’t build self-driving cars in a lab and understanding the real problems faced by our clients is fundamental to making those problems AI-soluble. 

Equally important to these partnerships is the cornerstone of knowledge work: trust. Law firms build their reputations on decades of being entrusted with their clients’ most complex and critical problems. Lawyers build theirs on the trust that they will deliver impeccable work on unreasonable deadlines. To empower both, Harvey must build the same trust by developing AI systems that are not only powerful, but also scalable, transparent, and secure. We do so by building systems that replicate historic best practices for establishing trust in knowledge work—such as tiered review and the ability to incorporate natural language feedback—while pioneering novel systems for AI alignment and validation. 

To develop these cutting-edge systems, Harvey brings together engineers from the best AI research labs and lawyers from the most prestigious firms in the world. This collaboration is unprecedented, but again, so is this opportunity. The technology that powers tomorrow’s knowledge work can no longer be serviceable; it must be groundbreaking. The backing of our incredible investors gives us the resources to scale our team, deepen our partnerships, and build the AI systems that are the future of professional services.