Humans&, a human-centric AI startup founded by former researchers and executives from Anthropic, xAI, Google, and academia, has raised $480 million in seed funding at a reported valuation of $4.48 billion. The round includes backing from Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, SV Angel, GV, and Emerson Collective. The three-month-old startup was founded by Andi Peng, Georges Harik, Eric Zelikman, Yuchen He, and Stanford professor Noah Goodman, with a team drawn from OpenAI, Meta, AI2, and MIT.
Humans& focuses on building software that helps people collaborate more effectively with AI, with concepts similar to an AI-enabled messaging platform. The company aims to build AI that functions as a connective layer, strengthening collaboration across organizations and communities.
The unusually large seed round reflects a broader surge in investor interest in startups launched by alumni of major AI labs. Humans& plans to rethink how models are trained and how users interact with AI, highlighting the need for advances in long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory, and user understanding. The company also plans to train systems that actively request information from users and retain it for future use. While the scale of the round stands out, it follows recent mega-seed financings across the AI sector, where large checks and high valuations have become more common, even as outcomes remain uncertain.
