Authorized AI big Harvey acquires Hexus as competitors heats up in authorized tech

Harvey, the high-flying authorized AI startup, has acquired Hexus — a two-year-old startup that builds instruments for creating product demos, movies, and guides — as the corporate continues its aggressive growth amid fierce competitors within the authorized tech market.

Hexus founder and CEO Sakshi Pratap, who beforehand held engineering roles at Walmart, Oracle, and Google, tells TechCrunch that her San Francisco-based crew has already joined Harvey, whereas the startup’s India-based engineers will come onboard as soon as Harvey establishes a Bangalore workplace. Pratap provides that she’s going to lead an engineering crew targeted on accelerating Harvey’s choices for in-house authorized departments.

“What we’re bringing to Harvey is deep expertise constructing enterprise AI instruments in adjoining downside areas,” Pratap mentioned. “This experience helps Harvey transfer sooner in a market that’s changing into more and more aggressive.”

Hexus had raised $1.6 million from Pear VC, Liquid 2 Ventures, and angel traders earlier than the acquisition. Whereas Pratap declined to share deal phrases, she mentioned the construction was aligned round “long-term crew incentives.”

The acquisition comes as Harvey seems to be to cement its place as considered one of AI’s hottest startups. The corporate confirmed final fall that it’s now valued at $8 billion after elevating $160 million, bringing its funding throughout 2025 to $760 million. Andreessen Horowitz led that latest spherical, joined by new traders T. Rowe Value and WndrCo, alongside present backers Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Conviction, and angel investor Elad Gil. (It began the yr with a $3 billion valuation after Sequoia led a $300 million Collection D spherical within the firm.)

Harvey now claims greater than 1,000 purchasers throughout 60 nations, together with a majority of the highest 10 U.S. regulation companies.

When TechCrunch spoke with co-founder and CEO Winston Weinberg in November, he traced Harvey’s origin story again to a chilly e mail despatched to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Weinberg, then a first-year affiliate at O’Melveny & Myers, and co-founder Gabe Pereyra, a researcher who labored at Google DeepMind and Meta and was Weinberg’s roommate on the time, examined GPT-3 on landlord-tenant regulation questions from Reddit. After they confirmed the AI-generated solutions to attorneys, two out of three mentioned they’d ship 86 of 100 responses with zero edits.

“That was the second after we had been like, wow, this whole business may be reworked by this know-how,” Weinberg mentioned.

They emailed Altman on July 4, 2022, obtained on a name that very same morning, and landed their first test from the OpenAI Startup Fund shortly after. In keeping with Weinberg, the OpenAI Startup Fund stays Harvey’s second-largest investor.