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- Harvey has acquired Benchmark, a startup serving asset managers, to further its push beyond Big Law.
- Benchmark built software to help asset managers hold on to what they learned from past deals.
- Harvey is now betting it can use legal work as a doorway into the rest of the enterprise.
Legal software giant Harvey has been cleaning up in the law firm market. Now, it is looking to deepen its foothold on Wall Street.
To do that, Harvey has acquired Benchmark, a four-year-old startup that builds software for asset managers, Business Insider has learned. The companies declined to disclose the terms of the deal.
The acquisition is Harvey’s third since January and brings a team of fewer than 10 into the fold. Winston Weinberg, Harvey’s cofounder and chief executive, said the deal will push the company further into one of its fastest-growing customer segments. But the bigger prize, he said, is the talent.
“In terms of how we think about acquisitions, the bar is just crazy, crazy high for us,” he said. “At the end of the day, you can build technology pretty fast right now. And so the talent is what matters. That matters more than anything else.”
Alec Dunn started Benchmark to help asset managers hold on to what they learned from past deals. Dunn had spent more than five years in private equity, hunting for the kinds of real-estate deals others might overlook. Because his firm closed only a small fraction of the deals it considered, he said, most of that work wound up buried in spreadsheets or forgotten altogether.
Dunn built Benchmark with Connor Janson, a childhood friend and technologist, to solve that problem. The software lets firms search across old deal files and compare new opportunities with those they have reviewed before. Benchmark had raised $3.3 million from a group of investors that included Y Combinator.
The acquisition points to where Harvey sees its next phase of growth.
Harvey got its start selling software to elite law firms and has already blanketed much of Big Law. The company says it works with the vast majority of the 100 highest-grossing law firms in the United States. Its fastest growth, however, is now coming from legal teams inside companies. Last month, Harvey reported adding $100 million in net new annualized revenue in a single quarter.
That surge has helped lift Harvey to an $11 billion valuation — and raised the stakes for how much bigger it can become. Law firms are spending more on technology, but they still represent a relatively narrow market compared with the broader corporate world. The bigger opportunity for Harvey now lies outside Big Law.
Asset management is one place where the company sees room to run. Harvey is not trying to help investors pick stocks or manage portfolios. Instead, Weinberg said, it is betting that nearly everything an asset manager does, from forming a fund to financing a leveraged buyout, eventually runs through a legal document.
That has already pulled Harvey beyond the legal department. Dealmakers are increasingly using Harvey’s software alongside their lawyers, Weinberg said, not because Harvey is building a separate product for them, but because they are involved in the same deals and processes. Harvey says it counts 50 asset managers as customers, including Blue Owl Capital, Bridgewater Associates, and KKR.
The expansion also brings Harvey into closer competition with other startups knocking at Wall Street’s door, such as Legora and Norm AI. The frontier model labs are closing in from another direction. OpenAI and Anthropic already market their tools to asset managers.
Weinberg said the legal tech market is going to get much more crowded before it consolidates. “It’s the most interesting time ever in legal tech. Ever,” he said.
Harvey is betting it can emerge from that shakeout as a tool for more than just lawyers. It wants to own legal work wherever it happens.