Latest news with #CNBCDisruptor50
CNBC
7 days ago
- Business
- CNBC
Legal AI startup Harvey hits $100 million in annual recurring revenue
Artificial intelligence startup Harvey on Monday announced it has reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, just three years after its launch. Harvey runs an AI-powered legal platform for lawyers at law firms and large corporations. Its technology can help with legal research, drafting and diligence projects, and the company is also building industry-specific use cases. Winston Weinberg, co-founder and CEO of Harvey, said the startup's ARR milestone has largely been driven by usage. Harvey has surpassed 500 customers, including CNBC's parent company, Comcast, and its weekly average users have quadrupled over the past year, the startup said. "Most of our accounts grow pretty massively," Weinberg told CNBC. "You'll sell to a Comcast or to a law firm, and they'll buy a couple hundred seats, and then they expand that usage pretty quickly." Weinberg is a former lawyer, and he co-founded Harvey with his friend and roommate Gabe Pereyra, a former research scientist at Google DeepMind and Meta. The pair launched the company in 2022 after experimenting with OpenAI's large language model GPT-3, which came out before its viral AI chatbot, ChatGPT. The company's name, Harvey, is partially inspired by one of the main characters in "Suits," a legal drama TV series, Weinberg said. Harvey has raised more than $800 million from investors, according to PitchBook, including Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and the OpenAI Startup Fund. The company also earned a spot on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list. "With gen AI, and how fast everything's moving, you just have to learn how to scale really, really fast," Weinberg said. "I'd say, like every six months I go through a new scaling experience." In the months ahead, Weinberg said Harvey is focused on its global expansion and continuing to build out its team. The startup recently hired Siva Gurumurthy, the former director of engineering at Twitter, as its chief technology officer, and John Haddock, who spent a decade at Stripe, as its chief business officer. Weinberg said he has learned to appreciate the value of a strong team, especially during periods of rapid growth. "We're starting to get to the point where we have really good leadership in place," Weinberg said. "That just changes your ability to scale to such a massive degree."
CNBC
31-07-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Figma CEO says AI superintelligence is not a looming threat to the company
Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field said Thursday that artificial intelligence doesn't pose a serious threat to the future of the design software company, which is on the verge of debuting on the public markets. "We're in this moment where you might, if you're singularity-pilled, go, 'Hey, superintelligence is coming and it'll be able to do things that no human can do," Field told CNBC's "Squawk Box." "I have a harder time believing that we're going to approach that really quickly right now, but that doesn't mean it's out of the picture." Figma is slated to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "FIG" on Thursday. Last week, the company estimated that it would price shares in the range of $25 to $28, and on Wednesday it priced above that range at $33 a share. The offering values Figma, which ranked No. 45 on this year's CNBC Disruptor 50 list, at $19.3 billion. The company was supposed to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion, but the deal was scrapped in December 2023 after regulators objected. So-called "superintelligence," a type of artificial intelligence that would be more powerful than the human brain, has recently become a growing focus among technology companies. Field told CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin that the company's "complex" graphics engine and other aspects of its technology make it difficult to be replaced by superintelligence. "I think that's not stuff that you can learn from looking at code and sort of various places on the internet," Field said. "It's not part of the pre-training data mix. I believe that doing that at scale — it's quite difficult." Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been especially vocal about the potential for superintelligence, declaring in a Wednesday memo that the technology will serve as a tool for "individual empowerment" over automation and efficiency. Meta recently created a lab to pursue superintelligence, and Zuckerberg has poured billions of dollars into building a roster of top AI talent.
CNBC
10-07-2025
- Business
- CNBC
34-year-old built a $1.3 billion business after working 100-hour weeks to keep it alive: I got there by 'going through hell'
Jake Loosararian struggled for three years to get his artificial intelligence startup Gecko Robotics off the ground. He considered walking away, when a customer offered him $500,000 to buy the business in 2015. Now, a decade later, the business is worth $1.25 billion — following a $125 million fundraising round led by Cox Enterprises, the company announced on June 12. The new funding round means Gecko's valuation has nearly doubled since December 2023, when it was valued at $633 million in a different fundraising round. Gecko began in 2012, when Loosararian and some of his electrical engineering classmates at Pennsylvania's Grove City College built a 40-pound robot with an ultrasonic scanner to climb and scan a local power plant's walls, hoping to identify costly issues in need of repair, like cracks or corrosion. The robot ended up saving the power plant millions of dollars in productivity and labor costs, Loosararian told CNBC Make It on November 23. Loosararian, Gecko's co-founder and CEO, decided to turn the school project into a full-time business after graduating in 2013 — hoping to build robots that could help inspect critical infrastructure of all kinds. He did it against the advice of his family and professors, he said. "Everyone said, 'Don't f---ing do it,'" said Loosararian, whose company ranks No. 30 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 spent nearly three years struggling to bootstrap Gecko, sleeping on friends' couches and facing bankruptcy while working 100-hour weeks, he said. Sometimes, his workplace was the "dirty and horrible" insides of power plant boilers, fixing early robot prototypes when they malfunctioned, he added. Loosararian considered giving up and walking away multiple times during that stretch, he said. But he still figured that running his own company was better than working for someone else, and the more time he spent with Gecko's customers, the more he convinced himself that his business was viable, he said. "What helped me get through it was spending time with customers and hearing how important the problem was to solve ... That gave me the encouragement I needed to feel I wasn't just fooling myself," said Loosararian. In 2016, Loosararian's resilience finally paid dividends when Gecko got accepted to Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator, paving the way for the business to land seed funding from the accelerator and its network of investors. Today, Gecko makes robots armed with AI technology that can climb walls, fly and even swim underwater to inspect and collect data on critical infrastructure like power plants, bridges, dams and military equipment. Its clients include the U.S. Navy, power plant operator NAES and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, according to the company. Loosararian's early struggles only solidified his resolve to stick it out as a bootstrapping founder, he said: "Those scars allow you to act with confidence, courage and a will to make [your goals] become reality. That's a very helpful thing. It was only possible through that refinement of going through hell."
CNBC
18-06-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Oura, Maven Clinic team up to bring biometric data into clinical care
Women's and family health platform Maven Clinic is partnering with smart ring maker Oura, a step forward in the integration of the increasing amount of data being collected by wearable devices and clinical care. As part of the partnership, eligible Maven members will be able to sync the data that their Oura Ring collects with the Maven platform, allowing members of the Maven care team to comb over the Oura-collected data like sleep, stress and activity to provide enhanced health guidance. Maven Clinic, a three-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company, is the largest virtual clinic for women's and family health with more than 2,000 employers and health plans using its platform. The company, which raised a $125 million funding round valuing it at $1.7 billion in October 2024, offers programs that range from fertility and family building to maternity and newborn care to menopause and midlife health. Kate Ryder, CEO and founder of Maven Clinic, said that we're in a "reinvigorated era of consumer health," a period that is being defined by the amount of data being collected via wearables and the desire of people to use those diagnostics to seek treatment and advice. Ryder said that a recent survey of Maven Clinic members found that nearly three out of four members are tracking their health regularly with some sort of device, and consumers are asking, "How do I take my health into my own hands with all these tools and areas of wellness at my fingertips to try to live a healthier life?" That shift prompted Maven's new partnership with Oura, also a three-time Disruptor 50 company, which was ranked No. 23 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list and has been on its own path of wellness and preventive health via its eponymous Ring in recent years. While Oura's initial focus centered on tracking sleep and recovery metrics, its scope has widened significantly in recent years to broader healthcare and personal health issues. As Oura CEO Tom Hale said in a recent CNBC interview, "the vision for the future of Oura has to do with the doctor in your pocket." That includes a wide variety of metrics, features and health indicators tracked by the Oura Ring and parsed by the company's AI and analytics to offer wearers' health insights, including a variety of female-focused features around menstrual, period and pregnancy cycles. "One of our key theses is that women have been overlooked in science, and in health understudied and overlooked, but we believe that they expect the same level of personalization, transparency and immediacy from their healthcare," said Oura chief commercial officer Dorothy Kilroy. "This is what they want, and traditional healthcare hasn't really kept up with that for women and their families." Kilroy said that the partnership between the two companies aims to deliver that, offering "smart, connected personalized care that'll fit into their lives and not the other way around, which is kind of what the old healthcare systems have provided." The ultimate goal is to improve health outcomes through the utilization of the data collected by the Oura Ring, allowing for more personalized recommendations, the ability to catch issues sooner and be more proactive, and layering in expert medical care at critical points. "Tracking is the first step, but really it's not just about surfacing health data," Ryder said, noting that Maven Clinic is the first virtual care platform to turn Oura's health signals into expert care. "We really want to act on it to actually drive better outcomes." One example of how the data could be utilized would be in the case of a pregnant Maven member diagnosed with gestational diabetes. That person could work with a Maven nutritionist or support coach to help regulate their glucose levels, while using Oura's physical activity tracking and meals and glucose features to monitor their progress. Oura is increasingly working with a variety of partners in the healthcare sector to use the biometric data collected by its Rings, Kilroy said, allowing it to be "paired with clinical care and creating that kind of seamless experience where the members can both understand what's going on in their body but they can actually use that to get expert care all in one place." Ryder said that she sees the convergence of this sort of biometric tracking and the clinical side as leading towards much more effective preventative care, leading to "much better outcomes," especially among high-risk patients where this sort of reporting and engagement can result in significant improvements in health. Maven Clinic will start to integrate the Oura data into its platform starting later this summer, with a goal of having it reach all members who want to opt in by the winter. Maven members will also receive exclusive pricing on the purchase of an Oura Ring. "We have to shift our healthcare system into prevention and invest more in wellness and wellbeing," Ryder said. "There's a lot of exciting stuff that this partnership can do to take the step forward, be innovative and show the outcomes on the back end."
CNBC
17-06-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Fintech Ramp's valuation hits $16 billion in deal led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund
Ramp, which offers a financial operations platforms to corporate clients, has raised its valuation to $16 billion in a new fundraising led by long-time investor Founders Fund, Peter Thiel's venture firm. The $200 million round is the fifth that Founders' has led for Ramp and raised its valuation by $3 billion. It last raised money at a $13 billion valuation in March. Founded in 2019, Ramp offers services that cover corporate cards, procurement, bookkeeping, travel booking, and vendor management, and says it handles tens of billions in purchases annually across 40,000 companies. Ramp ranked No. 6 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list. Its list of clients includes CBRE, Shopify and two fellow 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 companies, Anduril and Notion (Founders Fund is also an investor in Anduril). Ramp has been increasing its offerings for enterprise companies. In January, it launched Ramp Treasury, which allows companies to earn 2.5% on idle operating cash. It also acquired Venue, an AI-powered procurement software startup, and used it to roll out new vendor payment tools. Last June, it debuted Ramp Travel, partnering with Priceline for booking and managing expenses for corporate travel, moving into the market of fellow Disruptor Navan. The company says it has shipped 270 features this year, with a focus on increased automation of financial operations and use of AI, and still serves only 1.5% of the addressable U.S. market. Ramp co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman wrote in a blog post about the fundraising that he is guided by his favorite companies' missions: "Increase the GDP of the internet (ten-time Disruptor Stripe); Make humanity a multiplanetary species (SpaceX); Be Earth's most customer-obsessed company (Amazon)." "Ours can fit on a Post-it too," he wrote. "Save your company time and money (without you noticing)." "Let the robots chase receipts and close your books, so you can use your brain and build things," he added. Additional investors in the round included Thrive Capital, D1 Capital Partners, General Catalyst, GIC, ICONIQ Growth, Khosla Ventures, Sands Capital, 8VC, Lux Capital, Stripes, 137 Ventures, Avenir Growth, and Definition Capital.
