Niko Grupen is Head of Applied Research at Harvey, an AI-powered legal technology platform serving elite law firms and Fortune 500 companies globally. He leads the development of custom large language models for complex legal challenges across multiple jurisdictions.

Niko earned his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University, where he was advised by Bart Selman and Daniel Lee, focusing on multi-agent systems and reinforcement learning. He worked as an AI researcher at Google Brain from 2022 to 2023, and previously spent two years as a Machine Learning Engineer at Apple, where he designed the first prototype of Auto-Unlock for macOS, iOS, and watchOS.

Niko has published research at top AI conferences including AAAI and NeurIPS, with expertise in multi-agent reinforcement learning and emergent communication. He holds a Master's in AI from Cornell and a Bachelor's in Computer Science from Villanova University with minors in Mathematics and Economics.

At Harvey, Niko leads the Applied Research team in developing BigLaw Bench, a proprietary evaluation framework that measures AI performance on real-world legal tasks. He has overseen the integration of multiple frontier models including Claude, GPT, and Mistral to deliver statistically significant improvements in complex legal workflows.

Under Niko's research leadership, Harvey has grown to serve over 1,000 customers across 60 countries, reaching $190M in annual recurring revenue by end of 2025. The platform has been adopted by a majority of AmLaw 100 firms and processes millions of legal documents with improved accuracy and reduced hallucination rates.