Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra, the San Francisco roommates behind the $15.5 billion legal AI firm, are wiring Harvey into lawyers’ data.
By Hollis Varga
Four years after a first-year litigator and an artificial intelligence researcher started a company out of their shared San Francisco apartment, Harvey has become one of the most valuable legal technology businesses in the world. This week its founders made clear where they think the next round of growth will come from: not from a smarter chatbot alone, but from plugging that chatbot into everything a law firm already owns.
On Oct. 21, Harvey made its Connector Library generally available, a set of integrations that let lawyers pull documents and data from outside systems into Harvey’s workflows and, starting with document management platforms, write work back out again. The same day, the financial data company PitchBook announced that its integration with Harvey had moved out of beta, and Harvey said that CVS Health was deploying its software across the company’s corporate affairs functions after a pilot.
What the connectors do
In a statement to The Inquirer, a Harvey spokesperson described the change in practical terms. “Previously, customers had to gather information from separate systems and bring it into Harvey themselves,” the spokesperson said. “With the Connector Library, lawyers can pull in documents and data, including company financials and deal history from PitchBook, directly within Harvey workflows, without leaving the platform. This gives Harvey more context to produce more relevant analysis and drafts, so lawyers spend less time gathering information and more time advising clients.”
Harvey’s announcement lists connectors to tools such as Docusign, Datasite, NetDocuments, Everlaw and Microsoft Outlook, and says each one goes through a security review. Firms can also build custom connectors using the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for linking AI systems to outside data, and Harvey’s own agent can suggest which connector to use for a task. The law firms Ropes & Gray and Finn Dixon & Herling are also named in the announcement.
PitchBook said its integration had drawn 21,000 users across 3,000 accounts and more than 10 million tool calls. “Our customers increasingly do their work inside AI platforms, and we’re committed to meeting them there with trusted data they can act on,” Paul Jaeschke, PitchBook’s chief product officer, said in the release. Nate Schlein, Harvey’s head of product business development, said in the same release, “We built Harvey’s Connector Library so firms can bring the data they rely on into their everyday work.”
At CVS Health, Sam Khichi, the company’s executive vice president for corporate affairs and chief legal officer, said in Harvey’s announcement, “At CVS Health, we are deploying AI to elevate our colleagues’ work, improve the customer experience, and use our efforts and resources efficiently.” Weinberg, Harvey’s chief executive, said CVS “has demonstrated a thoughtful and strategic approach to AI adoption.”
From a shared apartment to a $15.5 billion valuation
Weinberg was a first-year litigation associate at O’Melveny & Myers, and Pereyra was a research scientist who had worked at DeepMind, Google Brain and Meta, when the two roommates founded Harvey in 2022, according to TechCrunch.
The company’s growth since has been steep. On Sept. 9, Harvey announced that it had raised $550 million at a $15.5 billion valuation, in a round co-led by Diffusion and Lightspeed, with participation from existing backers including Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Conviction, GIC and Goldman Sachs Alternatives, and new investors including Sapphire Ventures and Whale Rock. Harvey also said that day that it was acquiring Guardrails AI, a San Francisco company that builds safety and reliability tools for AI agents, Law.com reported.
“The opportunity for companies to accelerate their competitive advantage with AI has never been higher,” the founders said in a joint statement with the funding announcement. “Harvey wants to be the global partner legal teams turn to for this work, and we plan to hire and develop the best team in the space.”
The Harvey spokesperson told The Inquirer that more than 3,500 customers now use the product, including 80 percent of the Am Law 100, the country’s highest-grossing law firms, more than 1,600 in-house legal teams and five of the Fortune 10. “Our ARR is already more than $400 million, up from $190 million at the end of last year,” the spokesperson said, referring to annual recurring revenue. The Inquirer could not independently verify those figures.
Two fortunes, mostly on paper
Bloomberg estimated in a feature published in May that Weinberg and Pereyra were each worth about $1.6 billion, based on their stakes in the company. That estimate predates the September round, and The Inquirer did not find a more recent published estimate.
The founders have been reluctant to treat that wealth as real. In January, The New York Times reported that Weinberg, then 30, and Pereyra, then 34, still lived together with a third roommate. “Yeah, sure it’s in the billions, but it’s on paper,” Weinberg told The Times. Jai Das, a Sapphire Ventures partner quoted in the same article, described the new class of AI founders as “paper billionaires.”
In a statement to The New York Post that month, Weinberg said, “Yes, Gabe and I still live together with one other roommate,” adding that “it’s not a statement in any way, but more of a reflection of the fact that our lives haven’t changed much,” the Post reported.
Competition and the bet on custom models
Harvey does not have the field to itself. On Oct. 21, the same day as the connector announcement, the Stockholm-founded legal AI company Legora said it had raised $550 million at an $8.8 billion valuation, with annual recurring revenue above $200 million, TechCrunch reported. TechCrunch described Harvey as Legora’s biggest competitor. Established legal publishers, including Thomson Reuters with its CoCounsel product, are also selling AI tools to the same firms.
Research data is another front. Artificial Lawyer reported on Oct. 19 that the legal research startup Midpage was channeling its case-law data into Harvey, noting that Harvey has a more limited arrangement with LexisNexis and that Legora has been building its own research capabilities.
Asked about Harvey’s long-term strategy, the spokesperson pointed to a recent post on X by Pereyra, written in response to news of a large AI investment by the law firm Kirkland & Ellis. “We think the best future for legal is one where every law firm is able to convert their unique expertise into their own AI and use that to provide their clients with exceptional service,” Pereyra wrote. “We are starting to invest heavily in training our own models and helping firms do the same.”
That vision, in which each firm’s documents and know-how become the raw material for its own AI, depends on exactly the kind of plumbing Harvey shipped this week.
Thomson Reuters and two Stanford Law School researchers who study legal technology, David Freeman Engstrom and Megan Ma, did not respond to requests for comment.
Hollis Varga covers San Francisco’s billionaires and the money behind the city’s politics, philanthropy and real estate, working from campaign filings, foundation tax returns, corporate disclosures and the public record, for the Inquirer’s Billionaires desk. More from Hollis Varga
