Here We Go Again... AI Starts Sponsoring Sports
AI companies have started sponsoring sports teams. Just like crypto companies in 2021.
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In the span of about six weeks, legal AI startup Harvey has announced sports partnerships with Paris Saint-Germain, VfB Stuttgart, the Texas Rangers, the New York Liberty, and the Golden State Warriors and Valkyries.
For a company that makes AI tools for lawyers, that's a lot of courtside signage.
Why Sports?
Harvey isn't struggling for credibility. The company recently raised $200 million at an $11 billion valuation. Slaughter and May, one of the UK's elite "Magic Circle" law firms, just adopted Harvey's platform firmwide across all practice areas. More than 60% of the Am Law 100 reportedly use the product. By any reasonable measure, Harvey has real enterprise traction in its core market.
Which raises the question: why is a legal AI company spending money to put its name on jerseys? The last industry to go on a sports sponsorship spree was crypto, and the timeline is worth revisiting.
In 2021, at the peak of the crypto boom, exchange companies flooded into sports. FTX paid $135 million for naming rights to the Miami Heat's arena. Crypto.com renamed the Staples Center. Coinbase became the official crypto partner of the NBA, WNBA, and G League. The Dallas Cowboys signed a deal reportedly valued at $6.5 billion with Blockchain.com. FTX even gave Shohei Ohtani the nickname "The Great Cryptohtani."
The logic was straightforward: sports offer massive audiences, loyal fanbases, and an aura of legitimacy. As sponsorship strategist Jim Andrews told The Drum at the time, these deals help companies in "murky" categories build brand familiarity with tens of millions of people who don't really understand the product.
The Bursting Bubble
Then came 2022. Bitcoin cratered. FTX collapsed in a fraud scandal. The Miami arena got its old name back. The celebrity endorsers went quiet. Billions in sponsorship value evaporated alongside the tokens they were promoting.
The parallel to AI isn't perfect, but the pattern is recognizable. When a company with genuine enterprise customers starts spending heavily on consumer-facing brand awareness through sports it's worth asking what that money is actually for.
Harvey's press releases frame the partnerships as community commitments and celebrations of regional roots. The Warriors deal emphasizes Harvey's San Francisco origins. The Liberty deal highlights New York as a major hub. But community goodwill doesn't require multi-year sponsorship contracts with professional sports franchises. That's brand-building at scale, and it's expensive.
The deeper issue isn't whether Harvey is a real company. It is. The issue is what stage of the hype cycle we're in when an $11 billion legal AI startup decides the best use of its capital is plastering its logo across multiple professional sports leagues. Crypto companies didn't sponsor sports teams because they were failing. They did it because they had more money than they knew what to do with, and they needed to convert speculative momentum into mainstream legitimacy before the market corrected.
Why This Time Is Different
Harvey's situation is different in important ways. It sells to enterprises, not retail investors. Its product does something concrete. But the sponsorship behavior is eerily familiar: a venture-backed company in a white-hot category spending aggressively on brand awareness that doesn't directly serve its existing customer base. Lawyers aren't choosing their AI platform because it sponsors a WNBA team.
None of this means Harvey is the next FTX. But when the sports sponsorship playbook starts running again — different industry, same pattern, it's at least worth noting. The last time a tech sector got this aggressive with arena deals and jersey patches, it didn't end with a parade. It ended with a bankruptcy court. The scoreboard doesn't lie. But sometimes the sponsors do.
There's also a non-zero chance this is a brilliant move by Harvey and we're just too early to see where the puck is headed. Harvey's direct clients are law firms. But Harvey has also built a component called Shared Spaces. That launched in December 2025. This allows clients of the law firms to access an "AI-powered space" where the law firm and clients can work together in a secure environment.
See where I'm going?
Harvey started as AI to law firm, business to business. They recently moved further down the value chain to work with law firms and their clients. Now Harvey is doing sports sponsorships. Perhaps to gain brand awareness ahead of a consumer product launch? To be clear, I'm speculating.
I wouldn't go to court with an AI as my legal council. But a reliable AI lawyer I could ask simple legal questions to? I would sign up for that.