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

Harvey, a top AI inventor, has discovered Hexus — a two-year-old startup that creates tools for creating demos, videos, and tutorials — as the company continues to grow amid fierce competition in the legal technology market.

Hexus founder and CEO Sakshi Pratap, who previously worked in engineering roles at Walmart, Oracle, and Google, tells TechCrunch that his San Francisco-based team is already on board with Harvey, while the startup’s engineers from India will come when Harvey sets up an office in Bangalore. Pratap adds that he will lead an engineering team focused on accelerating Harvey’s offerings in legal departments.

“What we bring to Harvey is our expertise in building business AI tools in complex environments,” said Pratap. “This expertise enables Harvey to move quickly in this rapidly growing market.”

Hexus raised $1.6 million from Pear VC, Liquid 2 Ventures, and angel investors before the purchase. Although Pratap declined to share the deal, he said the plan was based on “long-term incentives.”

The acquisition comes as Harvey looks to solidify its position as one of AI’s hottest startups. The company confirmed last fall that it is now in high demand $8 billion after raising $160 million, bringing its revenue through 2025 to $760 million. Andreessen Horowitz led the new round, joined by new investors T. Rowe Price and WndrCo, along with existing backers Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Conviction, and angel investor Elad Gil. (It started the year with a The cost of $ 3 billion (After Sequoia led a $300 million Series D round for the company.)

Harvey now serves more than 1,000 clients in 60 countries, including many of the top 10 US companies.

When TechCrunch spoke with co-founder and CEO Winston Weinberg in November, he traced Harvey’s original story to cold email was sent to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Weinberg, who was a first-year partner at O’Melveny & Myers, and co-founder Gabe Pereyra, a researcher who worked at Google DeepMind and Meta and was in the same room with Weinberg at the time, tested GPT-3 on homeowner questions from Reddit. After showing AI-generated responses to lawyers, two-thirds said they would send 86 out of 100 responses without conversion.

“That was the moment we were like, wow, this whole business can be changed with this technology,” Weinberg said.

They emailed Altman on July 4, 2022, made a phone call that morning, and received their first check from the OpenAI Startup Fund shortly after. According to Weinberg, the OpenAI Startup Fund will remain Harvey’s second investor.