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

Harvey, the high-flying legal AI startup, has taken over Hexus – a two-year-old startup that builds tools for creating product demos, videos and manuals – as the company continues its aggressive expansion amid fierce competition in the legal technology market.

Hexus founder and CEO Sakshi Pratap, who previously held engineering roles at Walmart, Oracle and Google, tells TechCrunch that its San Francisco-based team has already joined Harvey, while the startup’s India-based engineers will come on board once Harvey sets up an office in Bangalore. Pratap added that she will lead a technical team focused on accelerating Harvey’s offering for in-house legal departments.

“What we bring to Harvey is deep experience in building business AI tools in adjacent problem areas,” said Pratap. “This expertise will help Harvey move faster in an increasingly competitive market.”

Hexus had raised $1.6 million from Pear VC, Liquid 2 Ventures and angel investors before the acquisition. While Pratap declined to share the terms of the deal, she said the structure was aligned with “long-term team incentives.”

The acquisition comes as Harvey looks to strengthen its position as one of the hottest AI startups. The company confirmed last fall that it is now valued $8 billion after raising $160 million, bringing its 2025 funding to $760 million. Andreessen Horowitz led that latest round, joined by new investors T. Rowe Price and WndrCo, in addition to existing backers Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Conviction and angel investor Elad Gil. (It started the year with a Valuation of $3 billion after Sequoia led a $300 million Series D round in the company.)

Harvey now claims more than 1,000 clients in 60 countries, including a majority of the top 10 U.S. law firms.

When TechCrunch spoke to co-founder and CEO Winston Weinberg in November, he traced Harvey’s origin story to a cold email sent to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Weinberg, then a first-year associate at O’Melveny & Myers, and co-founder Gabe Pereyra, a researcher who worked at Google DeepMind and Meta and was Weinberg’s roommate at the time, tested GPT-3 on questions about landlord-tenant law from Reddit. When they showed the AI-generated responses to lawyers, two out of three said they would send 86 out of 100 responses without any editing.

“That was the moment where we thought, wow, this entire industry can be transformed by this technology,” Weinberg said.

They emailed Altman on July 4, 2022, received a phone call that same morning, and received their first check from the OpenAI Startup Fund shortly thereafter. According to Weinberg, the OpenAI Startup Fund remains Harvey’s second-largest investor.