Humans& Raises $480M Seed Round at $4.48B Valuation

A new AI startup, Humans&, has raised $480 million in seed funding to pursue the belief that technology should assist people rather than replacing them. The round values the company at $4.48 billion.

It drew investments from big names like Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and investment firms including SV Angel, GV and the Emerson Collective, which is run by Laurene Powell Jobs. Now just three months old, the company is a fly-speck compared with OpenAI and DeepMind, but the size of the new funding round demonstrated strong interest from investors in teams comprised largely of veterans of top AI labs.

Humans& is the product of a team of high-profile researchers and engineers. The team consists of Andi Peng, previously at Anthropic working on more advanced versions of the Claude model, one of Google’s early employees Georges Harik who was instrumental in building Google’s ad systems, and xAI researchers Eric Zelikman and Yuchen He from Grok (chatbot), as well as Noah Goodman, Stanford professor with a focus on psychology and computer science.

The startup now has around 20 employees, many of whom came from OpenAI, Meta, MIT, AI2 and other leading research groups. Humans& is working on building software that makes people work better together, and it’s also kind of like a smart messaging platform backed by AI.

One of the company’s aims is to teach AI systems that can ask humans questions, remember useful answers and apply the knowledge again later. According to the team, applying this approach can help establish tools that take a better and deeper understanding of users into account and support long-term collaboration.

On its website, Humans& says it wants AI to work as a bridge that fortifies teams and communities. To accomplish this, the company intends to reimagine how large models are trained and how we interact with them. The startup is researching long-term learning, teamwork among multiple AI systems, memory and deeper user understanding while keeping research and product work tightly coupled.

The large seed round is part of a broader trend of heavy investment in AI startups from former executives at big tech companies. Recent examples include Thinking Machines Lab, which raised $2 billion last year, and Unconventional AI, which landed $475 million to work on energy-efficient computing. Other young AI companies have also quickly attained high valuations, underscoring how competitive and fast-moving the sector has become.