Legal AI might not sound like the sexiest category in Silicon Valley, but Harvey‘s CEO Winston Weinberg has captured the attention of virtually every top-tier investor in the Valley. The company’s cap table reads like a who’s who of venture capital: the OpenAI Startup Fund (its first institutional investor), Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Elad Gil, Google Ventures, Coatue, and most recently, Andreessen Horowitz.
The San Francisco-based company’s valuation skyrocketed from $3 billion in February 2025 to $5 billion in June to $8 billion in late October — a rise that reflects both the bonkers price tags awarded to AI companies, and Harvey’s ability to win over major law firms and corporate legal departments.
In fact, the startup now claims 235 clients across 63 countries, including a majority of the top 10 U.S. law firms. It also says it surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue as of August.
TechCrunch spoke with Weinberg for this week’s StrictlyVC Download podcast to ask about the wild ride that he and co-founder Gabe Pereyra have been on so far. During that chat, he shared how a cold email sent a few summers ago to Sam Altman changed everything; why he believes lawyers will benefit rather than suffer from AI; and how Harvey is tackling the technically complex challenge of building a truly multiplayer platform that navigates ethical walls and data permissioning across dozens of countries.
This interview has been edited lightly for length. For the full monty, check out the podcast.
TechCrunch: You started as a first-year associate at O’Melveny & Myers. When did you realize AI could transform legal work?
Winston Weinberg: So my co-founder was working at Meta at the time; he was also my roommate. He was showing me GPT-3, and in the beginning, I swear to God, the main use case I had for it was running a Dungeons and Dragons game with friends in LA. Then I was assigned to this landlord-tenant case at O’Melveny, and I didn’t know anything about landlord-tenant law. I started using GPT-3 to work on it.
Techcrunch event Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. San Francisco | WAITLIST NOW
My co-founder Gabe and I figured out we could do chain-of-thought prompting before that was really a thing. We created this super long chain-of-thought prompt over California landlord-tenant statutes. We grabbed 100 questions from r/legaladvice [on Reddit] and ran that prompt over them, then gave the question-answer pairs to three landlord-tenant attorneys without saying anything about AI.
We just said, “A potential customer asked this question, here’s the answer—would you make any edits or would you send this as is?” On 86 of the 100 samples, two out of three attorneys or more said they would send it with zero edits. That was the moment when we were like, wow, this entire industry can be transformed by this technology.
... continue reading