Harvey raises $80M to construct generative AI for legal professionals

Harvey, a generative artificial intelligence startup focused on the legal career, announced Tuesday that it has secured a $80 million Series B funding round that raised the corporate’s valuation to $715 million.

The funding round was co-led by Elad Gil and Kleiner Perkins with participation from OpenAI’s startup fund, the developer of the favored ChatGPT AI chatbot, and Sequoia. This funding round follows Harvey’s previous $21 million Series A funding round in April and brings the corporate’s total funding to over $100 million.

Generative AI has develop into a robust tool for skilled services and corporations with its capability to ingest large amounts of knowledge on any material to know unstructured information and respond conversationally to natural language prompts and questions. The massive language models behind AI chatbots can engage in humanlike conversation after being connected with vast amounts of data. That features confidential sources, equivalent to legal documents, which suggests they’ll summarize large documents, act as research assistants, write and edit legal briefs, and more.

Nonetheless, the general-purpose models can have downsides equivalent to inaccuracies in terms of domain-specific knowledge. In a single infamous example, a Recent York lawyer used ChatGPT, a general-purpose AI chatbot, to jot down a legal transient and submit it to a court. The result was riddled with errors and false citations and put him in legal trouble.

Equally problematic, information sent to ChatGPT shouldn’t be secure or private. It’s subject to human review by third parties and will reveal sensitive client information opening up ethical issues for lawyers.

To handle these issues, Harvey sought to construct its own proprietary service based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 AI model to supply greater legal accuracy, security and privacy to a growing variety of law firms in an invite-only service that catered to their specific needs. The waitlist has been tight, but several customers have already joined including Allen & Overy, which joined in February, and Macfarlanes in September.

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC, the massive accounting firm, partnered with Harvey in March to roll out a legal chatbot and signed a 12-month contract. “Harvey’s AI solution marks an enormous shift in the way in which that tax and legal services might be delivered and consumed across the industry,” Carol Stubbings, PwC’s global tax and legal services leader, said in regards to the partnership.

By making an AI model that focuses on legal knowledge as a substitute of a general-purpose model, Harvey’s AI chatbot can avoid what’s often called “hallucinations,” or when an AI makes confident false statements. The corporate said that it intended to construct its custom AI models by integrating the legal best practices of the firms that it really works with equivalent to tiered reviews and transparency. The corporate said that’s because legal work is predicated on repute and establishing trust.

Harvey said that engagement with its legal generative AI platform has “increased exponentially” and that revenue has risen greater than tenfold since April.

The corporate said that it would use the brand new funds to proceed to expand its custom model constructing based on domain-specific legal knowledge, scale out its team, and spend money on further product features for clients.

Image: Harvey