Harvey’s CEO Winston Weinberg thinks the $1 trillion legal market is too big and too fragmented for any one software company to sweep it. So the $8 billion legal-tech startup is trying a different play: bankroll whatever comes next.
Harvey said Wednesday that it will begin investing in young legal-tech startups, partnering with venture capitalist Zach Posner’s The LegalTech Fund to scout and back the next wave of tools for law firms and in-house legal teams.
Speaking at the Legalweek conference, Weinberg said the pace of change in AI means there’s still room for new category leaders to be minted.
“Everything can get disrupted,” he said.
Harvey’s move reflects a broader trend in Silicon Valley. Today’s hot startups sometimes also act like mini-venture capital firms, using their balance sheets to back younger, early-stage startups. OpenAI, Coinbase, and Anthropic each have funds dedicated to investing in startups.
Harvey can’t vet every legal tech startup, so it will outsource that work to people who do it for a living. The LegalTech Fund gets leverage, too. It can dangle access to Harvey’s brand halo and client base, making the fund more attractive to founders and increasing the likelihood that its startups will succeed.
“We’re out there as aggressively as you can be, talking to hundreds of different startups on a monthly basis,” Posner said. “We want to be able to help these startups reach their full potential.”
Harvey says it will invest using the company’s revenue rather than raising a stand-alone fund. It expects to write checks of less than $2 million each.
Weinberg says customers routinely ask for tools tailored for very specific jobs — patent drafting or client intake — use cases Harvey isn’t necessarily positioned to build itself. Investing lets Harvey point steer those clients to vendors it trusts while keeping a hand on the wheel as it tries to build the main tech hub.
Some investments could turn into partnerships, allowing customers to access those tools directly through Harvey’s product. The gating issue, Weinberg said, is security. Any vendor has to clear Harvey’s bar before it can integrate. Other investments could be a first step toward an acquisition.
More than $4 billion flowed into startups building tech for lawyers in 2025, nearly double the previous year’s total, according to Crunchbase. That money piled up at the top: more than a third of the total went to just three companies — Harvey, legal case management startup Filevine, and legal software startup Clio. Harvey has raised a total of $1 billion in funding from investors.
Already, that cash is reshaping the market. Some companies are buying. Legora, Harvey’s chief rival, said Wednesday that it had acquired Walter, a startup developing autonomous software for routine legal work, as it pushes deeper into agentic systems. Harvey, too, has been on the hunt, buying the sales-tech startup Hexus in January. Others are pouring money into hiring and sales, racing to get trials inside firms before competitors lock them up.
Some founders have told Weinberg that fundraising can be tough because investors worry a bigger player will “eat” them.
“I’ve heard that from a lot of small-scale startups,” Weinberg said.
Having Harvey invest, he said, can neutralize that anxiety for founders.
For Harvey, the move into investing is also a full-circle moment. The company traces back to a cold email its founders — Weinberg, a former junior lawyer, and former Google DeepMind engineer Gabe Pereyra — sent to Sam Altman and Jason Kwon, who was the general counsel at OpenAI. That outreach helped land one of Harvey’s earliest institutional checks from the OpenAI Startup Fund.
Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at @MeliaRussell.01. Use a personal email address and a non-work device.
Read the original article on Business Insider
The post $8 billion legal behemoth Harvey is getting into the startup investing game appeared first on Business Insider.
