Legal AI startup Legora hits $5.6B valuation and its battle with Harvey just got hotter

Nvidia has laid a new brick in its AI empire. NVentures, its corporate venture capital fund, has backed Legora, reportedly its first legal AI investment.

Using AI to help lawyers streamline their work, the Swedish-born legal tech startup competes with US player Harvey.

Together with Atlassian and other new financial investors, NVentures joined Legora’s cap table as part of a $50 million Series D extension that comes a month after the startup’s $550 million Series D.

In the meantime, this Y Combinator alum exceeded $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) – a milestone that contributed to the new post-money valuation of $5.6 billion.

This brings Legora’s valuation slightly closer to Harvey’s, which reached $11 billion last month when Sequoia tripled its investment. Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Conviction Partners, Elad Gil, Matt Miller’s Evantic and Kleiner Perkins also participated in that round.

Legora is also backed by high-profile VCs, but is placing even more emphasis on the big names it has secured as clients, such as Bird & Bird, Cleary Gottlieb and Linklaters. According to the company, the platform it launched just 18 months ago is now used by more than 1,000 law firms and in-house legal teams in 50 markets.

Harvey has game in that area too. It claims Our clients include 100,000 lawyers in 1,300 organizations, ranging from global law firms such as Hengeler Mueller and Latham & Watkins to corporate legal teams at companies such as T-Mobile and Bridgewater.

With global leadership as the end goal, the rivalry between Harvey and Legora is one they want to play out on each other’s home turf. Legora has opened multiple offices around the world, with the US being a key focus for its expansion. Conversely, Harvey invades Europe.

Now that there is a lot of capital to spend on both sides, that battle has shifted to mindshare. Not long after, Winston Weinberg’s company Harvey signed a brand partnership with actor Gabriel Machtwho plays a powerful lawyer in the TV series ‘Suits’, Legora launched an advertising campaign with movie star Jude Law under the slogan ‘The law just got more attractive’.

Both companies may be right to focus heavily on marketing. Rivalry aside, they are built on top of large language models from AI giants that could well become their competitors. When Anthropic launched a legal plugin for Claude not long ago, several publicly traded legal software companies launched saw their shares fall.

Legora CEO Max Junestrand says he is not worried.

“Fundamental models are improving rapidly, but the real value is in how they are applied,” he wrote in a statement. It also shows how the startup is instilling FOMO in its audiences, stating that “the legal teams that effectively embed AI today will shape the way the industry evolves.”

NVentures’ investment is also a signal that Legora may have enough leverage to protect them from the model makers and their bigger rival.

However, Nvidia is also known for hedging its bets. After all, it invested in both Anthropic and OpenAI before deciding it had probably had enough.