By Akash Sriram
January 20 (Reuters) – AI startup Humans&, founded by former OpenAIresearchers from Alphabet and xAI, raised $480 million in a seed funding round, which values the company at $4.48 billion, it announced Tuesday.
This outsized seed round highlights intense investor interest in next-generation AI labs founded by veteran researchers, as companies race to create systems that go beyond chatbots and agent tools.
The round was led by SV Angel’s Ron Conway and his co-founder Georges Harik, while Nvidia, Jeff BezosAlphabet’s VC arm, GV, among other venture capitalists, also participated.
Nvidia has become a major backer of AI startups as demand for its chips rises, taking stakes in companies that rely heavily on its hardware.
Humans& said it is working on human-centered AI tools for communication and collaboration, and plans to launch a product early this year.
“The model will coordinate with humans, and with other AIs where appropriate, to enable people to do more and bring them together,” CEO Eric Zelikman told Reuters.
The company’s founding team includes researchers and engineers from leading AI labs and institutions such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta.
Harik was Google’s seventh employee and played a pivotal role in the company’s early growth. He worked on the launch of Gmail, launched Google Docs, and led Google’s acquisition of Android.
Zelikman, also a co-founder, previously worked at Elon Musk’s xAI, where he contributed training data for Grok-2. His research experience includes work on reasoning-focused reinforcement learning methods.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)