Humans&, a startup with a philosophy that AI should empower people rather than replace them, has raised 480 million dollars in seed funding at a 4.48 billion dollar valuation. Investors in the round include chipmaker Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and venture capital firms SV Angel, Google Ventures, and Laurene Powell Jobs’s firm Emerson Collective.
This megadeal for the three-month-old company follows a trend of investors funding startups founded by breakaways from major AI labs. Humans&’s founders include Andi Peng, a former Anthropic researcher who worked on reinforcement learning and post-training of Claude models; 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 startup’s roughly twenty employees also come from OpenAI, Meta, Reflection, AI2, and MIT. Humans& aims to use software to help people collaborate with each other, envisioning an AI version of an instant messaging app. One of their goals is to use existing AI techniques to train AI in new ways, such as programming chatbots to request information from users 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. The startup cited a need for innovations in long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory, and user understanding, alongside a tightly integrated focus on both science and product development.