Humans&, a ‘human-centric’ AI startup founded by Anthropic, xAI, Google alums, raised $480M seed round

Humans&, a startup with a philosophy that AI should empower people rather than replace them, has raised $480 million in seed funding at a $4.48 billion valuation, reports The New York Times. Investors in the round include chipmaker Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and VC firms SV Angel, GV, and Laurene Powell Jobs’ firm Emerson Collective.

The megadeal for the three-month-old company follows a trend of investors throwing money at startups founded by breakaways of major AI labs. Humans&’s founders include Andi Peng, a former Anthropic researcher who worked on reinforcement learning and post-training of Claude 3.5 through 4.5; Georges Harik, Google’s seventh employee, who helped build its first advertising systems; Eric Zelikman and Yuchen He, two former xAI researchers who helped develop the Grok chatbot; and Noah Goodman, a Stanford professor of psychology and computer science.

The company’s 20-odd employees also come from OpenAI, Meta, Reflection, AI2, and MIT, according to the company. The startup aims to use software to help people collaborate with each other — think an AI version of an instant messaging app. One of their goals is to use existing AI techniques to train AI in new ways, like programming chatbots to request information from the user and store it for later use.

In order to build AI that serves “as a deeper connective tissue that strengthens organizations and communities,” humans& hopes to rethink “how we train models at scale and how people interact with AI,” per the company’s web page. The startup cited a need for innovations in “long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory, and user understanding,” as well as a tightly integrated focus on both science and product development.

The humans& seed round, while enormous, is far from an outlier in the current AI funding environment. The largest seed round in history, for now, belongs to Thinking Machines Lab, which raised $2 billion last July at a $12 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati alongside top researchers from Meta and Google, the company initially attracted enormous enthusiasm, though the departure of half of the company’s founding team across recent months suggests that massive capital and pedigree don’t guarantee immediate success.

Other notable mega-seed rounds include Unconventional AI’s $475 million raise in December at a $4.5 billion valuation — the company, founded by former Databricks AI head Naveen Rao, is developing energy-efficient neuromorphic computing systems — and Lila Sciences’ $200 million seed round last March for its autonomous AI-powered laboratory platform.

LMArena, the AI model benchmarking platform that spun out of UC Berkeley, similarly bolted out of the gate as a commercial venture, raising $100 million at a $600 million valuation last May. Earlier this month, the startup announced a $150 million Series A round at a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion.

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Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch where she covers the business, policy, and emerging trends shaping artificial intelligence. Her work has also appeared in Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and other publications.

You can contact or verify outreach from Rebecca by emailing rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at rebeccabellan.491 on Signal.

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