Humans& AI Startup, Founded by Ex-Anthropic, xAI, Google Staff, Raises $480M Seed
▼ Summary
– Humans&, a startup focused on AI that empowers people, has raised $480 million in seed funding at a $4.48 billion valuation from investors including Nvidia and Jeff Bezos.
– The company’s founders are former researchers from leading AI labs like Anthropic, Google, xAI, and Stanford, reflecting a trend of funding breakaways from major AI organizations.
– The startup aims to build AI software that facilitates human collaboration, similar to an AI-enhanced instant messaging platform.
– A key technical goal is to use existing AI techniques in novel ways, such as training chatbots to request and store user information for later use.
– Humans& plans to innovate in areas like reinforcement learning and memory to create AI that strengthens organizations, requiring a tight integration of science and product development.
A new artificial intelligence company, Humans&, has secured a landmark $480 million in seed funding, achieving a staggering $4.48 billion valuation just three months after its founding. This massive investment underscores the intense market appetite for ventures launched by alumni of leading AI research labs. The funding round attracted high-profile backers including Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, SV Angel, Google Ventures, and Emerson Collective, the firm led by Laurene Powell Jobs.
The startup’s core philosophy centers on developing AI that acts as a powerful tool for human collaboration, rather than as a replacement for people. The team envisions creating software that functions like an AI-enhanced instant messaging platform, designed to strengthen the connections within organizations and communities. To achieve this, the company plans to innovate in areas like long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, sophisticated memory systems, and deep user understanding.
This ambitious vision is backed by a founding team with pedigrees from some of the most influential names in technology. The co-founders include Andi Peng, a former researcher at Anthropic who worked on reinforcement learning and the post-training phases for models like Claude; Georges Harik, an early Google employee instrumental in building its first advertising systems; former xAI researchers Eric Zelikman and Yuchen He, who contributed to the development of the Grok chatbot; and Noah Goodman, a Stanford professor specializing in psychology and computer science.
The company’s approximately twenty employees further bolster its expertise, with recruitment from elite institutions like OpenAI, Meta, and MIT. A key technical goal for Humans& involves leveraging existing AI methodologies in novel ways to train more effective systems. One example is programming AI assistants to proactively ask users for information and intelligently store that data for future interactions, creating a more seamless and helpful experience.
The substantial seed investment reflects a broader trend of venture capital aggressively flowing into startups founded by veterans of major AI labs. Humans& aims to distinguish itself by maintaining a tightly integrated focus on both foundational scientific research and practical product development. The company states its mission is to fundamentally rethink how AI models are trained at scale and how people ultimately interact with this transformative technology.
(Source: TechCrunch)
