AI Startup Humans& Raises $480M Seed Round
Los Angeles-based AI startup Humans& has announced a $480 million seed funding round at a $4.48 billion valuation, the second-largest seed round in venture capital history. The founding team includes former leads from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google DeepMind. Investors cited confidence in the team's vision for “human-centric AI” as the primary driver for the massive early-stage investment.
- The round is the second-largest seed investment in venture capital history, surpassed only by the $2 billion raised by Thinking Machines Lab in July 2025. This fundraising immediately establishes Humans& as a unicorn. - Notable investors in the round include Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, GV (formerly Google Ventures), and Emerson Collective, which is Laurene Powell Jobs' firm. The deal was co-led by SV Angel, Ron Conway's firm, and co-founder Georges Harik. - The founding team of five includes CEO Eric Zelikman, formerly of xAI where he worked on Grok-2, Georges Harik, who was Google's 7th employee, Andi Peng from Anthropic, Yuchen He from xAI, and Noah Goodman, a Stanford professor. - The company's mission is to build AI that acts as a collaborative partner rather than a tool that simply executes tasks. They aim to solve the "stranger problem" in AI, where models lack long-term memory and each interaction starts anew. - Humans& plans to focus its research on multi-agent reinforcement learning, long-horizon planning, and persistent memory to allow its AI to build an understanding of users over time. - This mega-round is part of a larger trend of significant seed funding for AI startups founded by established experts from major tech labs, including Unconventional AI's $475 million seed round. - The strategic partnership with investor Nvidia will provide Humans& with crucial access to the advanced GPU infrastructure necessary for training large-scale AI models. - Los Angeles is a rapidly growing hub for AI, ranking second in the U.S. for AI funding in the third quarter of 2024 with $1.8 billion raised across 31 deals.
