Teachers’ pension plan invests $50-million in legal AI firm Harvey as competition heats up with LLM giants

Teachers’ pension plan invests $50-million in legal AI firm Harvey as competition heats up with LLM giants SEAN SILCOFF TECHNOLOGY REPORTER JOE CASTALDO PUBLISHED 1 HOUR AGO Open this photo in gallery: Harvey AI Corp. CEO Winston Weinberg. The company can maintain an edge by going deep into areas tailored for law firms, such as tools for due diligence, Mr. Weinberg says. AYESHA KAZIM/SUPPLIED COMMENTS SHARE SAVE FOR LATER Listen to this article Learn more about audio Log in or create a free account to listen to this article. Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has placed a bet in the crowded, fast-growing artificial-intelligence-powered legal software space, investing US$50-million in Harvey AI Corp., one of the leading platforms selling smart digital tools to lawyers. The investment by Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG), a unit of the pension giant that invests in later-stage technology companies globally, is an extension of a financing the San Francisco-based company announced earlier this month. At the time, Harvey said it had raised US$550-million led by private capital firms Diffusion and Lightspeed Ventures, at a valuation of US$15.5-billion. The TVG investment, the first by a Canadian institutional investor in the company, brings the round’s size to US$600-million. Harvey is one of the largest AI-powered software vendors globally, recently topping US$400-million in annualized revenues just four years after it was co-founded by chief executive officer Winston Weinberg, a 31-year-old securities and antitrust litigator. His co-founder, president Gabe Pereyra, was Mr. Weinberg’s one-time roommate and previously worked as a research scientist with Google’s DeepMind AI research arm. The 1,400-person company serves 20 per cent of the Fortune 500 and has more than 3,000 customers in 70 countries. Its 100-plus customers in Canada include law firms Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP, Dentons Canada, Gowling WLG and corporations Dentalcorp Holdings Ltd. and RONA Inc. Harvey opened an engineering and client support office in Toronto last year, its first outside the U.S. AI tool Vero aims to bring down legal costs for small businesses TVG executive managing director Olivia Steedman said her group had been tracking Harvey’s performance within the highly competitive legal AI technology market, and that it “stood out to us straight from the beginning. They beat all the targets they set out for themselves. The fact they’re getting this kind of adoption not only…