Every startup lives with the same tension: a large incumbent can copy or crush it at any time.
For Harvey, an artificial intelligence startup that builds tools for law firms and enterprises, the model-maker that powers its tech also has the power to destroy it.
From Harvey’s Manhattan office on Friday afternoon, cofounders Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra put it bluntly. Harvey’s toughest competitor isn’t another niche startup; it’s OpenAI.
“Our largest competitor is by far, indirectly, OpenAI,” Weinberg said. “I mean that in the sense of just — you need to make sure that your product gives so much more value than whatever the general products they’re releasing are.”
Harvey’s biggest rival is also a backer. The OpenAI Startup Fund wrote one of the first checks into Harvey and has continued to increase its stake with additional funding. To date, Harvey has raised over $800 million.
The startup, last valued at $5 billion, has counted on being domain-specific to attract large law firms. Harvey just signed its 50th client in the Am Law 100, a group of the largest US law firms by revenue, the company said.
The founders say they tell their team that customers will measure Harvey against whatever general-purpose tool OpenAI ships next, even if it doesn’t specifically target legal work.
Surveys by the American Bar Association and the Thomson Reuters Institute indicate that lawyers are already using ChatGPT to draft memos, conduct legal research, and predict case outcomes — with mixed results. Judges are increasingly catching fake citations in court documents.
Across the software market, concerns are growing that the foundation model companies will launch specialized tools for narrow domains or use cases. Recently, OpenAI blogged about a set of internal tools — a contract review tool among them — that it uses to run its own business.
OpenAI may be famous for its chatbot, but since 2022, it has emerged as a default partner for startups to build frontier tech for their industries without training their own large language models. Harvey builds on its models and works closely with the company to deploy custom-trained models and features for legal professionals.
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OpenAI hasn’t publicly released the tools it showed off. Still, the blog posts fanned fears that it could one day compete with the startups it now enables.
Harvey’s founders say the threat persists whether OpenAI targets lawyers or not.
Pereyra argued that big cloud and model providers will continue to perfect general-purpose AI platforms — helpful developments, but not a focus for Harvey. “They’re solving a very different problem,” he said.
Harvey wants to build the operating system for law firms: software that knows what a matter is, routes tasks to the right people, pulls the right documents at the right moment, and can swap in different models under strict controls.
In that view, the founders say the value isn’t in packaging ever-better models; it’s in the application layer that makes those models useful inside a law firm.
“If you think about them as the main competitor,” Weinberg said, “all that does is make you create better tools for your vertical faster.”
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