Legal AI startup Legora hits $5.6 valuation and its battle with Harvey just got hotter

Nvidia has laid a new brick in its AI empire. NVentures, its corporate VC fund, has backed Legora, reportedly its first legal AI investment.

Leveraging AI to help lawyers streamline their work, the Swedish-born legal tech startup is competing with U.S. player Harvey.

Alongside Atlassian and other new financial investors, NVentures joined Legora’s cap table as part of a $50 million Series D extension that comes a month after the startup’s $550 million Series D. 

In the interval, this Y Combinator alum crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) — a milestone that contributed to its new $5.6 billion post-money valuation. 

This brings Legora’s valuation just a tad closer to Harvey’s, which reached $11 billion last month when Sequoia tripled down on its investment. Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Conviction Partners, Elad Gil, Matt Miller’s Evantic, and Kleiner Perkins also participated in that round.

Legora, too, is backed by high-profile VCs; but it puts even more emphasis on the big names it secured as clients, such as Bird & Bird, Cleary Gottlieb and Linklaters. According to the company, the platform it launched only 18 months ago is now used by more than 1,000 law firms and in-house legal teams across 50 markets.

Harvey has game in that area too. It claims 100,000 lawyers across 1,300 organization as customers, ranging from global law firms like Hengeler Mueller and Latham & Watkins to corporate legal teams at companies like T-Mobile and Bridgewater.

With global leadership as the end goal, the Harvey v. Legora rivalry is one they intend to play on each other’s home turf. Legora has opened multiple offices around the world with the U.S. a key focus for its expansion. Conversely, Harvey is pushing into Europe.

With plenty of capital to spend on both sides, that battle has moved to mindshare. Not long after Winston Weinberg’s company Harvey signed a brand partnership with actor Gabriel Macht, who plays a high-powered lawyer in the TV series Suits, Legora launched an advertising campaign featuring movie star Jude Law under the slogan “Law just got more attractive.”

Both companies may be right to bet heavily on marketing. Rivalry aside, they are built on top of large language models made by AI giants who could well become their competitors. When Anthropic launched a legal plugin for Claude not long ago, several publicly listed legal software companies saw their stocks drop.

Naturally, Legora CEO Max Junestrand says he isn’t concerned.

“Foundation models are improving quickly, but the real value is in how they’re applied,” he wrote in a statement. It also shows how the startup instills FOMO among its target users, stating that “the legal teams that embed AI effectively today will shape how the industry evolves.”

NVentures’ investment is also a signal that Legora might have enough of a moat to protect them from the model makers, and its bigger rival.

However, Nvidia is also known for hedging its bets — after all, it invested both in Anthropic and OpenAI before deciding it has probably had enough.