As enterprise AI adoption accelerates across regulated industries, legal AI platform Harvey is making a decisive move: India is no longer an adjunct market — it is becoming central to the company’s global engineering and product strategy.
With Pradeep Reddy set to join as Head of India Engineering and Site Lead for Harvey’s new Bengaluru office, the company is formalizing what has quietly become a strategic priority over the past year. The appointment follows strong momentum from Harvey’s recent on-site hiring drive in Bengaluru and growing traction among enterprise customers in the region.
Katie Burke, Harvey’s Chief Operating Officer explains the key factors that have changed in the last 12-18 months, for the company to take decisive steps. Says she, “Three factors converged. First, the company landed significant customers in India, creating immediate market demand and an installed base that required local engagement. Second, ambitious engineering and product velocity goals required deeper bench strength, with leadership already experienced in building high-performance teams in the region. Third, India’s talent density made it possible to scale complex AI engineering capabilities quickly and sustainably.”
To better understand the growth plans behind Harvey’s India expansion, we spoke to Sridhar Reddy, Vice President of Engineering at Harvey, who shares how India fits into Harvey’s global growth strategy — and what role it could play in shaping the company’s AI architecture over the next three years.
Some edited excerpts:
Is the India center being built as a cost-efficient extension, or as a core product and AI innovation hub with ownership of critical systems? What specific engineering capabilities did you find in India that were difficult to scale elsewhere?
It’s absolutely an engineering and innovation hub for Harvey. Our goal is to have every engineer at the company working on interesting problems for our customers and to have impact on our customers with their work, so our India team joins our San Francisco, New York, and Toronto teams as being a critical part of that promise.
How does Harvey approach secure AI deployment, domain-specific intelligence, and trusted content ecosystems — including the partnership with SCC Online in India?
Trust is the foundation upon which every other customer interaction is built, so we spent a significant amount of time and energy on security and governance as a company when we first started out. Since then, every integration we add and every new feature we build has security and governance in focus, including our partnerships —while also keeping localization and regional requirements in mind. We are thrilled to have SCC Online as a partner for legal research in the market, and to continue to provide data protection, reliability, and security our users can count on.
What does it take to operationalise AI platforms at enterprise scale, particularly in highly regulated sectors such as legal and professional services?
Enterprise scale means that we need to scale every element of our platform, from infrastructure to product engineering to model testing, to ensure it fits the scale needs of our largest customers, which is no small feat. But it also means scaling the services and support we provide customers as they transform their organizations with AI, so it’s imperative that Harvey does both.
There’s a reason HSBC, AZB& Partners, Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas, Infosys, and S&A trust Harvey-we’ve built the systems and approach to help their organizations scale with a legal AI platform trusted by the world’s best legal teams, and we are proud to have them as customers. Ensuring we have both R&D and User Ops support in India is critical to our success in the region but also our global growth, and we are proud to be growing our teams there.
How does India fit into Harvey’s long-term enterprise AI roadmap — especially as global enterprises demand 24/7 AI reliability?
India’s legal market is not just vast in size, it’s also vast in global influence given its massive economic influence, but also the number of multinational companies headquartered or with major outposts in India. So our plan for India is to start with our R&D office and continue to build and grow as market demand evolves–we are thrilled to be there and growing with Harvey.
Three years from now, what role do you see India playing in Harvey’s global AI architecture — talent engine, product innovation hub, or something more strategic?
Our #1 goal at that time would be that we are helping thousands of Indian businesses do great work with the Harvey platform. But in addition, my hope is that we are a great place to work in India and attract and retain great talent there, and that we are building exceptional products there.