Legal AI startup Legora has hit a $5.6B valuation and its battle with Harvey just heated up

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

Using AI to help lawyers organize their work, the Swedish-born legal startup is competing against US player Harvey.

Along with Atlassian and other new financial investors, NVentres joined the Legora table as part of a Series D extension of $50 million that comes a month after the initial Series D of $550 million.

Over time, this Y Combinator alum surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) — a milestone that contributed to its new valuation of $5.6 billion.

This brings Legora’s valuation right next to Harvey, which reached $11 billion last month when Sequoia tripled 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 puts more emphasis on the big names it has acquired as clients, such as Bird & Bird, Cleary Gottlieb, and Linklaters. According to the company, the platform it launched 18 months ago is now used by more than 1,000 law firms and internal legal teams in 50 markets.

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

With world leadership as the ultimate goal, the Harvey v. Legora is one they intend to play in each other’s place. Legora has opened many offices around the world and the US is the main focus of its expansion. On the other hand, Harvey is heading towards Europe.

With so much money to spend on both sides, that battle has shifted to mindshare. Not long after Winston Weinberg’s firm Harvey signed a brand partnership with actor Gabriel Macht, who plays a powerful lawyer in the TV series “Suits,” Legora launched an advertising campaign featuring movie star Jude Law under the slogan “The law just got hotter.”

Both companies would be right to bet heavily on advertising. Rivalry aside, they are built on top of the big languages ​​made by AI giants that could be their rivals. When Anthropic launched an official Claude plug-in not too long ago, several publicly listed official software companies saw their stocks drop.

Legora CEO Max Junestrand says he is not worried.

“The basic models are developing rapidly, but the real value is how they are used,” he wrote in a statement. It also points out how the startup is instilling FOMO among target users, saying “legal teams that successfully embed AI today will change the way the industry evolves.”

NVentures’ investment is also a sign that Legora may have enough moat to protect them from model makers, as well as its biggest competitor.

However, Nvidia is also known for hedging its bets – after all, it invested in both Anthropic and OpenAI before deciding that it might be enough.