Key Points
- Humans& raised $480 million in a seed round at a $4.48 billion valuation.
- Investors include Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, SV Angel, GV and Emerson Collective.
- Founders are former researchers from Anthropic, Google, xAI and a Stanford professor.
- The team’s talent pool includes alumni from OpenAI, Meta, Reflection, AI2 and MIT.
- The startup’s mission is to build AI that acts as a collaborative, instant‑messaging‑style tool.
- Key technical focus areas are long‑horizon reinforcement learning, multi‑agent systems, memory and user understanding.
- Humans& aims to redesign model training at scale and improve human‑AI interaction.
- The funding round reflects a broader wave of large seed investments in AI startups.
Funding Overview
Humans&, a three‑month‑old artificial‑intelligence startup, closed a seed round that raised $480 million and valued the company at $4.48 billion. The round attracted high‑profile investors such as chipmaker Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the venture firms SV Angel and GV, and Emerson Collective, the impact‑investment arm of Laurene Powell Jobs.
Founding Team and Talent
The company’s leadership combines expertise from several leading AI labs. Co‑founder Andi Peng previously worked at Anthropic on reinforcement‑learning and post‑training of Claude models. Georges Harik was Google’s seventh employee and helped build its first advertising systems. Former xAI researchers Eric Zelikman and Yuchen He contributed to the development of the Grok chatbot. Stanford professor Noah Goodman brings a background in psychology and computer science. Humans& also reports that its roughly 20 employees have experience at OpenAI, Meta, Reflection, AI2 and MIT.
Mission and Product Vision
Humans& positions itself as a “human‑centric” AI company, believing that artificial intelligence should empower people rather than replace them. The startup’s goal is to create software that lets users collaborate with AI in a manner similar to instant‑messaging apps. To achieve this, Humans& is focusing on advancing long‑horizon and multi‑agent reinforcement learning, memory systems, and deeper user understanding. The company says it will rethink how models are trained at scale and how people interact with AI, aiming to make AI a deeper connective tissue that strengthens organizations and communities.
Industry Context
The massive seed round for Humans& follows a broader trend of investors pouring capital into AI startups founded by alumni of major labs. While the round is among the largest seed financings, it is not the biggest; the record‑setting seed round belongs to Thinking Machines Lab, which raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation. Other notable mega‑seed deals include Unconventional AI’s $475 million raise and Lila Sciences’ $200 million round.
Source: techcrunch.com