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Harvey is worth nine times the two biggest AI companies selling to auditors, in a market that, in Europe at least, is larger than law. The explanation lies with the buyers.

Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, the professions have been told they are first in line. The UK Department for Education said so in 2023, ranking management consultants, financial managers and accountants as the three occupations in Britain most exposed to AI, and solicitors second for exposure to large language models. Goldman Sachs put the share of US legal tasks that could be automated at 44%.

Investors took the forecast at face value, but only in some places. This week Legora, the Stockholm company that traded as Leya until last year, closed a $550 million Series E at an $8.8 billion valuation, led by Atreides Management. In April it was worth $5.6 billion. A month earlier Harvey raised the same amount at $15.5 billion, close to double its valuation in December.

Companies selling to auditors have had a quieter year. DataSnipper and Fieldguide, the two best funded, are worth about $1.7 billion between them. That is despite every Big Four audit business growing last year, and despite accounting and audit being a larger market in the EU than law.

This week I look at who is building the new professional services businesses, why the money has gone to law and banking and not to audit, and whether the hiring data shows AI hollowing out the professions at all. My short answer to the last question is: not yet, and not in the way most people expect.

The companies attracting the money all do roughly the same thing. They sell to some of the most expensive professionals in the world, embed in their firms and charge per seat for work that used to be billed by the hour.

Harvey's September round was co-led by Diffusion and Lightspeed. The company says 80% of the Am Law 100 use it, as do in-house teams at five of the Fortune 10. It has raised more than $1.55 billion in total.

Legora is the most convincing evidence yet that a European company can lead in applied AI. Its annual recurring revenue is above $200 million, twice what it reported in April, and in-house legal teams accounted for more than 40% of its new customers in the third quarter. But the US is now its largest market, and the new money is going to North America to compete it Harvey's home market. 

Rogo has taken the same model to investment banking. Its $160 million round in April, led by Kleiner Perkins, valued it at $2 billion, against $750 million in January. It says 35,000 bankers and investors at 250 institutions use it to build comparables, draft memos and pull filings, all key aspects to the role of an investment banker. Rogo is now expanding into London.

Clio, the Vancouver practice-management company, raised $500 million at $5 billion last November and spent $1 billion on the legal research business vLex. EvenUp, which automates personal injury claims, was valued at $2 billion a month before that.

The technology is converging, and most of these products run on the same few foundation models but are redesigned to fit their specific customer profile, which is where they differ. Each company sells into a market of thousands of firms that compete for talent and clients, bill at premium rates and will pay for a tool that can ultimately improve their margins.

DataSnipper, from Amsterdam, sells an Excel add-in that automates the document checks that fill a junior auditor's week, and raised $100 million at $1 billion in February 2024. Fieldguide, in San Francisco, raised $75 million at $700 million in February, led by Goldman Sachs. Basis, a New York company building agents for accounting firms, reached $1.15 billion the same month.

In accounting, the larger valuations sit with bookkeeping. Pennylane, the Paris platform used by more than 800,000 companies, raised €175 million in January at about €3.6 billion, more than DataSnipper and Fieldguide combined. The highest price anyone has paid for audit software was Hg's $3 billion-plus buyout of AuditBoard in 2024, and AuditBoard sells to companies' own internal audit and risk teams rather than to audit firms.

Eurostat puts EU turnover in accounting, bookkeeping, audit and tax at €164 billion in 2022, against an estimated €140 billion for legal services. The Big Four took about $220 billion in global revenue in their 2025 financial years. Worldwide, PwC's assurance business made $19.8 billion, EY's $17.9 billion and KPMG's audit arm about $14 billion. 

A simpler way to see the gap is to compare what investors are paying with what customers spend each year. The 100 largest US law firms, the Am Law 100, billed about $179 billion in 2025. Investors value Harvey, Legora, Clio and EvenUp at about $31 billion combined, or roughly 17 cents for every dollar those firms bill in a year. In audit, PwC, EY and KPMG earn about $52 billion a year, and DataSnipper and Fieldguide are valued at $1.7 billion, or about 3 cents per dollar. Investors are paying five to six times more per dollar of a law firm's revenue than per dollar of an auditor's.

The two measures are not like for like. The legal figure covers only the largest US firms, while the audit figure is the worldwide audit revenue of three networks. A valuation also prices in expected growth rather than a single year's fees. Even allowing for this, it’s a sizeable difference.

Audit's buyers, its rules and its pricing are the problem.

Then there is the question of who keeps the saving. Law firms have kept theirs: they still bill by the hour and keep raising rates. Audit clients want theirs back. In February the FT reported that KPMG had told its own auditor, Grant Thornton UK, that AI should mean fewer hours and a smaller bill. The fee fell from $416,000 to $357,000, about 14%. A statutory audit is a compulsory annual purchase priced against a known number of hours. If clients accept that software is doing some of those hours, they will negotiate the fee down, and whatever they win is margin a software vendor will never see.

If AI were hollowing out the professions, hiring is where you would see it first. So far, the numbers show fewer juniors in firms whose revenue is still growing.

UK law shows it most clearly. The top 50 firms grew fee income 8.2% to £39.3 billion in 2025/26, according to The Lawyer. Across the 109 firms Legal Cheek tracks, training contracts for 2027 fall from 2,593 to 2,549, down 1.7%. The big firms are cutting harder: Linklaters from 100 to 60, Freshfields from 85 to 70 and Pinsent Masons from 68 to 54. Solicitor apprenticeships, which aren't in these figures, and US firms expanding their London intakes take up some of the difference. The reality is that these numbers pale in comparison to the Big Four. 

Deloitte's intake fell by 617 to 2,150, EY's by about 11% to 1,600 and PwC's by about 9% to 1,450. KPMG's fell by about a third, and it cut its UK workforce by 1,266. PwC UK cut another 200 graduate roles in 2025, to a planned 1,300. 

The firms' job adverts show where the hiring has gone. An FT analysis of more than 50,000 Big Four adverts in the UK, Ireland and four other English-speaking markets, reported in May, found that AI roles went from under 2% of postings in 2022 to almost 7% in 2025. Audit roles were just under 3%, although the FT was told audit headcount is still rising.

The cuts may be levelling off. Deloitte UK took on 1,353 graduates, apprentices and placement students this September, which it says is in line with 2025.

In both professions, firms are growing revenue, hiring fewer juniors and keeping the margin. The pyramid is getting narrower at the base, slowly. If software does the work that used to teach a first-year the job, the number of jobs at the entry level is likely to continue to decline and or grow ever-more competitive as universities churn out more graduates.

Investors in Harvey and Legora are betting on a fragmented, wealthy, competitive customer base. Investors in audit AI are betting on a few dominant networks that would rather own the technology, regulators who don't want to go first and clients who want the saving. Three developments could change that, and most of them are European.

Regulators won't help. In January the UK government dropped its audit reform bill, citing the cost to business, and the EU's Omnibus package has moved to shrink the sustainability assurance work that was meant to be audit's next growth market.

The point applies well beyond audit. Applied AI is priced on how many buyers a market has and how much of the saving they get to keep. The size of the profession matters much less. A large market whose spending runs through a handful of buyers is worth less than a smaller one spread across thousands, and less again when those buyers pass the saving on to their clients.

Europe's record is mixed. Legora shows a European company can lead a global category in applied AI, though it got there by winning American customers. Pennylane shows the continent can build a large accounting software business, at the bookkeeping end, where regulation is moving invoices onto structured data and software can replace the service. The audit of Europe's large companies, the one part of accounting the law requires and the Big Four control, has barely moved.

The professions are being rebuilt from the bottom up: fewer juniors, more software, fees that hold in law and slip in audit. Whether audit gets its Harvey depends less on the next model than on regulators in Brussels, London and Dublin, and on how many clients follow KPMG's lead.

The Unsophisticated Investor is brought to you by Mark, Head of UK Expansion & Operations at Shuttle. Shuttle's mission is to power the next generation of syndicate leads, fund managers, and their investors, backing the great innovations of tomorrow. To do it, we're building private market infrastructure for running investment operations. By stripping away the legal friction and admin for deal managers, we make it easier than ever for Investment managers to run high-performing opportunities and to open those opportunities up to a wider, modern network of investors.

Mark
Shuttle’s Head of UK Expansion & Operations