AI Startup Humans& Raises $480M Seed Round
Humans&, a three-month-old AI startup with a founding team from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, raised a $480 million seed round at a $4.48 billion valuation. The round is the second-largest seed in venture capital history and is aimed at building "human-centric AI" for enterprise workflows.
- The founding team includes CEO Eric Zelikman, formerly of xAI; Andi Peng from Anthropic; Georges Harik, who was Google's 7th employee; Yuchen He from xAI; and Stanford professor Noah Goodman, a former Google DeepMind researcher. - The round was co-led by early-stage venture firm SV Angel and co-founder Georges Harik, with strategic participation from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, GV (Google Ventures), and Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective. - This is the second-largest seed round in history, surpassed only by the $2 billion raised in July 2025 by Thinking Machines Lab, a startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. - The company's technical approach focuses on multi-agent reinforcement learning and developing models with persistent memory to solve what it calls the "stranger problem," where AI interactions lack carry-over context from one session to the next. - The product vision is to create an AI that serves as a "connective tissue" for organizations, helping
