Harvey ‘Acqui-hires’ Hexus for ‘Incredible Technical Experience’

Harvey has made its first ever acquisition of another company in the shape of Hexus, a small startup that packs a lot of punch in terms of talent. CEO Winston Weinberg told AL that Hexus – which has been working on product demos – provides ‘incredible technical experience’. One could therefore see this as an acqui-hire.

First, it’s important to note that the team is small – which it’s understood had raised $1.6m in early funding. Two people will join in San Francisco and two more will join Harvey in India next month.

Next you may say: ‘Why do this?’

Well, the answer is that the team has some serious experience and is composed of former Google and X/Twitter engineers. So, although their demo work is useful, they may be deployed on other enterprise needs as they have experience working in major companies, hence the point above about this being an acqui-hire.

For example, CEO Sakshi Pratap has worked at Google, Oracle and also Walmart in engineering roles.

‘The Hexus team joining Harvey creates an opportunity to meaningfully accelerate Harvey’s work supporting in-house legal teams,’ the legal AI pioneer stated.

AL asked Harvey’s CEO Weinberg some more about this.

‘On the ‘why’ – it’s the incredible technical experience, but also enterprise experience – the team has strong experience building for enterprise and that’s really valuable to us as we expand our in-house business, especially in highly regulated areas,’ he told AL.

So, although the team have been working on demo technology, their skills can be used across other areas. Plus, as Harvey pushes deeper into working with corporates they really want more talent like this.

Harvey’s CTO Siva Gurumurthy, who joined in May last year, added: ‘Harvey is hiring engineers in San Francisco, New York, Toronto, and Bengaluru, but given our incredible growth, we also are always on the lookout for exceptional talent that can help support making our platform even better for our customers.

‘Sakshi and Kunal (one of Hexus’s other founding engineers) have a great understanding of enterprise products, strong technical acumen, and a customer-centric mindset, and we look forward to welcoming them to Harvey.’

It’s an interesting move, and it raises the question whether Harvey will buy up other companies? However, it seems that even if they do, any such moves may be to bring aboard more talent that they can deploy on features they want to build, rather than doing M&A to bring in features that others have built.

More about Harvey here.