Legal AI giant Harvey has agreed to acquire New York-based investment firm-focused AI platform Benchmark.
The deal is intended to help accelerate the growth of Harvey’s asset management business. Harvey already collaborates with more than 125 investment management firms including Blue Owl Capital, Bridgewater Associates and KKR, focusing on specific workflows, notably investment due diligence, data room analysis and deal document review.
Benchmark’s AI-powered technology performs an array of legal tasks for investment firms across the asset management industry, such as automatically reading investment documents, summarising potential investments and helping investment managers scrutinise agreements.
Harvey’s CEO Winston Weinberg said: “When we asked our asset management customers which tools they trusted, Benchmark came up in nearly every conversation.
“Benchmark is built on a conviction we share: a firm’s edge is its institutional knowledge, and AI should help firms capture that knowledge and apply it. We’re proud to welcome Benchmark to Harvey.”
Benchmark co-founders Alec Dunn and Connor Janson commented that they created the AI firm in recognition that too much knowledge from previous investment deals stays “trapped in folders and in people’s heads”.
They added: “We’ve helped some of the best investment firms in the world put that knowledge to work. Harvey is one of the best application layer companies in the AI space and we already have shared customers, so this is a natural fit.”
The firm says that it has gained the trust of clients with combined assets under management of more than $2trn.
Its investors include start-up accelerator Y Combinator, which financed Benchmark in the winter of 2023, along with early-stage venture capital firm the Outsiders Fund.
Benchmark was founded in 2022. Dunn previously spent six years at real estate firm Related Companies, where he was latterly a private equity real estate associate.
Janson was project manager for software development firm Square for eight months before he co-established Benchmark, and prior to that he was product lead for San Francisco-based technology company Fast.
Harvey posted record net-new annual recurring revenue of $100m in the second quarter following a series of deals in the opening half of the year.
In January, it acquired AI product demo company start-up Hexus to accelerate Harvey’s work in supporting in-house legal teams. In March, the firm purchased AI-powered customer integration platform Lume, which has also been backed by Y Combinator.
In May, Harvey announced a partnership with Swiss legal AI intelligence start-up DeepJudge, a platform that allows legal teams to integrate their previous work and decision making into the firm’s workflows.
Its funding also surpassed the $1bn mark in March following a $200m financing round, valuing the company at $11bn. The company said it will use the funds to expand the scope of its AI agents and grow its legal engineering teams.
That round was co-led by Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and venture capital firm Sequoia, along with existing investors including private equity firms Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Conviction Partners, Evantic and Kleiner Perkins, plus angel investor Elad Gil.
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