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| (Jenna O’Malley/PitchBook News) |
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Anthropic's new Cowork tools, including one for legal work, sent software stocks plunging this month, but the large language model giant doesn't seem to faze legal AI companies like Harvey and Legora, and their investors.
Harvey is in talks with Sequoia and General Catalyst to raise new funding at a $11 billion valuation, Forbes reported. Meanwhile, rival Legora is targeting a (mere) $6 billion valuation in a new financing, per Bloomberg.
Both companies operate as horizontal platforms, marketing their legal AI tools widely to traditional law firms, in-house counsel and non-legal professional services. As for Claude Legal, one of Anthropic's new Cowork plug-ins, it offers capabilities for document review and case briefings.
Anthropic's wading into the legal field echoes what happened with AI coding assistants. If a large language model provider can offer the same applications without having to pay market rates for third-party API calls, it has an inherent advantage. But it would still have to cross the moats their specialized rivals have built.
I'm Rosie Bradbury, and this is The Weekend Pitch. You can reach me at rosie.bradbury@pitchbook.com or on X @_RosieBradbury.
"Most of [the legal AI startups] are building on Claude and ChatGPT, and it is expensive right now," said Tamara Steffens, managing partner at Thomson Reuters Ventures. "But [cost] is coming down, and that's where the talented engineers come in, who can take advantage of the least expensive model."
AI application developers are also lowering their costs by diverting certain queries to cheaper models, among other methods. So, in the long term, Anthropic's cost advantage may not be much of an advantage at all.
Moreover, is competing with these legal AI startups even what Anthropic wants? |
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| To build or to buy? Here’s the tech strategy for private market success. |
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Today’s leading private markets are rethinking their data foundation strategies and technology decisions to become more agile and competitive. But it’s not simply a matter of deciding whether to build a new data foundation or to purely buy a new platform.
Discover why a hybrid approach is critical to moving forward and how private markets can take control of their tech with this strategic guide from the financial data platform experts at Arcesium.
Read the guide |
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The aerospace and defense sector is having a comeback with record PE deal activity recorded in 2025, especially toward the end of the year. The sector saw $55.6 billion invested across 357 PE deals in 2025, hitting a new five-year record. In those last five years, which year saw the smallest total PE deal value in the aerospace and defense?
A) 2021
B) 2022
C) 2023
D) 2024
Find your answer at the bottom of The Weekend Pitch! |
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A selection from our most-read articles of the past few days.
- Blue Owl Capital accelerated plans to return capital to investors in one of its non-traded funds as a solution to a failed merger attempt, amid heightened jitters over private credit's exposure to software. Read more
- Nuclear fusion has captured Silicon Valley's imagination, even as investments in the technology break every VC norm. View the cohort of "fusion bulls"
- Mister Car Wash will be taken private by Leonard Green & Partners, marking the return of the business to its former owner and ending a disappointing spell in the public markets. See the top car wash PE investors
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"In a market where everything is getting bigger and more expensive, keeping fund sizes the same and staying with the same strategy is difficult."
—Kyle Stanford, PitchBook's director of VC research, speaking about how the average Series A has tripled in size since 2015 and how some boutique VC firms are choosing to keep their funds small in this changing environment. Read more about the fund math for Series A rounds, and the ways boutique VC firms like Benchmark have been able to stay afloat here. |
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| (Chris McLoughlin/Getty Images) |
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Answer: C.
In the last five years, 2023 saw the lowest PE deal value and count in the aerospace and defense sector, with just $24.6 billion spent across 220 deals, compared to the record-breaking numbers of 2025. Read more |
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Keep an eye out for these insights and research reports coming out this week:
- 2025 Annual US VC Secondary Market Watch
- Q4 2025 Agtech VC Trends
- Q4 2025 AI Public Comp Sheet and Valuation Guide
- 2025 Annual VC Emerging Opportunities
- Q4 2025 Medtech Public Comp Sheet and Valuation Guide
- Q4 2025 Pharma Biotools VC Trends
- Q4 2025 Healthtech VC Trends
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This edition of The Weekend Pitch was written by Rosie Bradbury and Nadine Manske. It was edited by Kia Kokalitcheva and Clarinda Simpson.
Were you forwarded The Weekend Pitch? Sign up at pitchbook.com/subscribe. |
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