AI Startup Humans& Raises $480M Seed
Humans&, a three-month-old AI startup, raised a $480 million seed round at a $4.48 billion valuation, despite having no product on the market. The company was founded by veterans from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. The deal represents the second-largest seed round in venture capital history.
- The only larger seed round on record belongs to Thinking Machines Lab, a startup from former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, which raised $2 billion at a $10 billion valuation. - The funding round was led by SV Angel and included participation from prominent investors such as Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and GV (formerly Google Ventures). - Co-founder Georges Harik was the 7th employee at Google and was instrumental in the development of products like Gmail and Android. Other founders include Eric Zelikman and Yuchen He from xAI, Andi Peng from Anthropic, and Stanford professor Noah Goodman. - The company's "human-centric" approach aims to create AI systems that act as collaborators to augment human capabilities, rather than tools that replace them. - A significant portion of the capital is allocated for the immense computing power required to train its foundational AI models. - Humans& is entering a competitive field of "next-generation AI labs" that includes other heavily funded startups like Unconventional AI and Lila Sciences. - The company's initial $4.48 billion valuation is higher than the current valuations of established AI companies like China's Moonshot AI ($3.3 billion).
