Harvey does not buy companies to decorate a slide. It buys them to compress time, a signal now registering clearly across tech news tracking legal AI consolidation. On January 21, 2026, the San Francisco-based legal AI company quietly pulled its first real M&A lever, acquiring Hexus, a two year old startup built around product demos, documentation, and the unglamorous art of making complex software actually land with users. No fireworks. No victory lap. Just a clean move that says more about where legal AI is going than any valuation headline ever could, and one already shaping the current tech news cycle.
Harvey was founded in 2022 by Winston Weinberg, a practicing litigator, and Gabriel Pereyra, a DeepMind researcher who understood that intelligence without workflow is just trivia. Since then, the company has moved like it knows exactly what it is racing against. Over 1,000 customers across 60 countries. Fifty of the AmLaw 100. Over $100 million in ARR. An $8 billion valuation confirmed in December. That is not hype velocity. That is operational gravity pulling the market inward, a scale moment increasingly highlighted in tech news covering enterprise AI.
Hexus brings a different kind of leverage. Founded by Sakshi Pratap, with Kunal Baweja as founding engineer and head of engineering and product, the team specialized in showing enterprise buyers how software actually works, not how sales decks promise it will. Demo videos. Interactive walkthroughs. Documentation that respects the reader’s time. Hexus raised $1.6 million, built across San Francisco and India, launched on Product Hunt, and now winds down as a product by April. This was always about the team, not the logo, a nuance often missed in tech news headlines about acquisitions.
Siva Gurumurthy, Harvey’s Chief Technology Officer, framed it plainly. The Hexus team understands enterprise products, technical depth, and customers who do not have patience for magic tricks. Sakshi Pratap now leads a new engineering group inside Harvey focused on in-house legal teams, a segment that does not buy tools for fun and does not forgive confusion. This is where legal AI either proves itself or stalls out quietly, a fault line tech news will be watching closely.
There is a clean wordplay hiding in the deal. Hexus helped companies explain what they built. Harvey is building the system lawyers actually work inside. When adoption becomes the bottleneck, explanation becomes strategy. Pair that with Harvey’s planned Bengaluru office and the incoming India-based Hexus engineers, and this acquisition starts to look less like an acqui hire and more like a pressure release valve on growth, a strategic pattern now emerging in tech news around AI driven platforms.
