Legal AI startup Harvey has held early talks about an IPO

Harvey's cofounder and CEO, Winston Weinberg. Harvey Harvey has held preliminary talks with lawyers at Latham & Watkins about an IPO. The startup sells artificial intelligence software to law firms and corporate legal departments. Harvey is likely paying attention to how upcoming tech listings fare before deciding its next steps. Harvey has been taking early steps toward an initial public offering. The legal artificial intelligence startup, which was recently valued at $15.5 billion, has held talks with lawyers at Latham & Watkins about going public, according to two people familiar with the matter. The discussions were preliminary, with no listing imminent, one of the people said. Rather, Harvey is likely to watch how the coming crop of tech listings fare before deciding whether to move ahead. Harvey declined to comment. Latham & Watkins did not respond to a request for comment. The idea of a four-year-old startup making its market debut would have seemed far-fetched just a year ago. Since then, SpaceX landed the largest IPO in history. Anthropic could top it when it lists shares, potentially as soon as the week before Thanksgiving. And OpenAI could go out in early 2027. A strong showing from Anthropic in a few weeks could open the door for a younger generation of companies to test the public markets. Harvey, which has become one of the more popular startups selling software to large law firms and corporate legal departments, could be among the first to try. Harvey said in September it had crossed $400 million in annual recurring revenue, or the money a company expects to collect over a year. That figure is nowhere near Anthropic's reported $65 billion run rate, but it puts Harvey in the same ballpark as Affirm, which tipped $509 million in revenue for the fiscal year before its 2020 listing. Snowflake had generated $242 million in revenue in the first half of 2020 when it went public later that year. This fall, Harvey raised $550 million in a round led by Diffusion and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other backers include Goldman Sachs Alternatives, J.P. Morgan's Growth Equity Partners, Coatue, and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price — the kinds of institutional investors that often join a startup's cap table as it prepares to go public. Harvey also bulked up its executive ranks this year. It hired Steve Zad, who helped steer cybersecurity company Rubrik through its 2024 IPO, as its first chief revenue officer. Former Google executive Keith Enright joined as chief strategy officer. Rachel Hepworth came on as chief marketing officer after stints at Slack and Notion, and chief product officer Anique Drumright arrived from Rippling. There were promotions, too. John LaBarre, Harvey's first legal hire and a former deputy general counsel at Snowflake, became chief legal officer. And Katie Burke became chief operating officer, bringing experience helping take HubSpot from a small private company to a publicly traded one. Alan Ghelberg has served as Harvey's chief financial officer since 2024. For Harvey, the potential path to Wall Street runs through one of its own customers. Kent Nishimura/Getty Images Before Harvey, many investors shrugged off legal tech. They saw a small market, with just 1.3 million lawyers in the United States. Lawyers had a reputation as Luddites. They worked in documents that software struggled to read and stored files on private servers. Large language models changed the equation. Months before ChatGPT launched, Harvey cofounders Winston Weinberg, a former junior lawyer, and Gabe Pereyra, an ex-Google DeepMind researcher, began using the technology to build software that could read and write legal documents. Today, Harvey has more than 3,500 customers, including 80% of the top 100 US law firms and 20% of the Fortune 500. Recent enterprise pickups include CVS Health and Lockheed Martin. That growth has triggered a funding frenzy as investors race to find the next Harvey. Legora, one of its closest competitors, raised $550 million in funding at an $8.8 billion valuation last month. For Harvey, the potential path to Wall Street runs through one of its own customers. Last year, Latham & Watkins, one of the industry revenue leaders, signed a deal to roll out Harvey's software to all its lawyers. The two companies are now developing custom tools for Latham's fund formation practice. Latham is no stranger to Harvey, or to taking companies public. Since 2016, it has advised companies on 186 offerings that raised more than $101 billion, making it the most active firm by deal count, according to Deal Point Data. Have a tip? Contact the reporter Melia Robinson at mrobinson@businessinsider.com or via Signal or WhatsApp or Signal at +1 (603) 913-3085. Sign up for her newsletter, Legal AI Insider, here. Read the original article on Business Insider