This startup sold Wall Street on AI. Its existential challenge is doing it again.
· Business Insider
Hebbia
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- Hebbia has relaunched its core product, Matrix, to help bankers and investors dig through documents.
- The company is betting that a revamped Matrix can restore its brand cachet in a crowded market.
- Hebbia's CTO says that after it initially launched Matrix, "the whole market started copying it."
Hebbia helped popularize AI for Wall Street. Now it's trying to stay ahead of the companies chasing the massive opportunity.
The startup, one of the earliest companies to use AI to analyze large collections of financial documents, is overhauling its flagship product as larger rivals like Harvey and Rogo crowd one of the tech's hottest enterprise markets.
The company said Wednesday that the new version of its main product, Matrix, can take a user's request, build the table needed to do the job, and then turn the results into a memo or slide deck.
For Hebbia, the stakes are existential. The market it once cracked open is now crowded with larger, better-funded rivals, and its core offering has become a standard feature of other apps.
Aabhas Sharma, Hebbia's chief technology officer and president, said that the new version will once again leapfrog the market. "This is going to be our mark in the sand," he told Business Insider.
'The whole market started copying it'
Founded in 2020, Hebbia built a business around a deceptively simple idea. Chatbots were good at answering one question at a time. Matrix lets users upload documents and ask a bunch of questions all at once. It then searched the documents and arranged the answers in a grid: one row per document, one column per question.
For a time, Hebbia appeared to be on a tear. The startup pushed into investment banks, law firms, and asset managers. It hired a sales force and plastered New York City with billboards. In 2024, Andreessen Horowitz led a $130 million funding round to fuel that expansion.
In a blog post, Hebbia's chief executive, George Sivulka, wrote that technology needs the right product to become useful, like fire needs a torch and the wheel needs a chariot. Hebbia, he wrote, was building the product layer for artificial intelligence.
In 2024, Hebbia raised $130 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.Hebbia
The grid did not remain Hebbia's signature for long. Rogo has a table interface. Harvey also built Vault to review documents in bulk. Legora has Tabular Review, too.
"The whole market started copying it," said Sharma, who joined Hebbia last year.
That posed two problems for Hebbia. Rivals were sucking up much of the attention and investment that had once flowed to the startup. Rogo and Legora have each raised two rounds this year. The Information this month reported that Harvey is working on a third.
Hebbia has not announced any further funding. Sharma said it remains "very well capitalized" from the last round.
Hebbia's customers, meanwhile, had found the limits of the original Matrix, he said. They still had to tell the software what columns they wanted in the grid, then export its answers into a memo, slide deck, or email.
Hebbia announced a major upgrade to Matrix, its tool for finding information in documents.Hebbia
The new version is designed to handle more of that setup.
A user can describe a task in plain English — for example, review a batch of credit agreements, pull the covenant terms, compare them with a prior review, flag changes, and draft a memo. Hebbia's virtual assistant, Max, is meant to turn that request into a Matrix, choosing the columns and sources it needs along the way.
Matrix can also now pull data from a firm's internal databases and other sources.
The biggest change for existing customers may be that Matrix no longer stops at a grid of answers. Hebbia's software can feed those results into a presentation or email, leaving the user to review it before it is sent.
Sharma said the relaunch puts Hebbia two steps ahead of its competitors. They might disagree. Rogo says its flagship product, Felix, can also take a single prompt and turn it into decks and documents. Harvey and Legora have already launched virtual assistants, known as agents, that can handle multistep tasks.
Hebbia has begun rolling out Matrix 2.0 to customers. Sharma said early tests suggest it is catching on. For pilot customers, the number of actions taken on Hebbia's software increased tenfold over one month, he said. Daily active usage tripled since May.
"It's been a wild ride," Sharma said. Whether it is a comeback will take longer to judge.
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