A vesting schedule defines when and how employees earn their allocated equity compensation, such as stock options, RSUs, and SARs, over time.

A common vesting structure is four-year vesting with a one-year cliff. Nothing vests during the first year. Once the one-year cliff is reached, 25% of the grant vests, with the remaining 75% vesting gradually over the next three years, typically monthly or quarterly. For a 100,000-option grant, this means 25,000 options vest at the one-year cliff, followed by roughly 2,083 options each month for the next 36 months.

The cliff is designed to support retention by ensuring employees complete an initial period before receiving a meaningful portion of their equity. After the cliff, employees continue to earn equity as they stay with the company.

Vesting can take several forms, including time-based and graded vesting, front- or back-loaded schedules, immediate vesting, milestone- or performance-based vesting, hybrid structures, accelerated vesting, reverse vesting, and flexible vesting tailored to an employee's role or circumstances.

Harvey, the legal AI startup, raised $550 million at a $15.5 billion valuation in a round co-led by Diffusion and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The raise brings total funding to more than $1.55 billion. PitchBook estimates Harvey has completed at least eight priced rounds since 2023.

The valuation trajectory has been fast: $8 billion in December 2025, $11 billion in March 2026, and $15.5 billion now — nearly doubling in nine months.

The funding comes a couple of weeks after Harvey announced Harvey Tenet, its first in-house model. Built from the open-weight Kimi K3 model and post-trained on legal data with the help of inference provider Fireworks, Tenet is part of Harvey's broader push toward open-weight models and giving customers the ability to adopt and post-train models themselves.

Source: TechCrunch