Humans anda startup whose philosophy is that AI should empower people rather than replace them, raised $480 million in seed funding at a valuation of $4.48 billion, reports the New York Times. Investors in the round include chipmaker Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and venture capital firms SV Angel, GV and Laurene Powell Jobs’ firm Emerson Collective.
The mega-deal for the three-month-old company follows a trend of investors throw away money has startups founded by separatists major AI laboratories. Humans’ founders include Andi Peng, a former Anthropic researcher who worked on reinforcement learning and post-training from Claude 3.5 to 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, professor of psychology and computer science at Stanford.
The company’s 20 or so 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 of 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 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,” according to the company’s webpage. The startup cited the need for innovations in “long-term and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory and user understanding,” as well as a tightly integrated focus on science and product development.
TechCrunch has requested comment.
The humans and seeds cycle, while huge, is far from an exception in today’s AI funding environment. For now, the largest seed round in history belongs to Thinking Machines Lab, which raised 2 billion dollars last July, with a valuation of $12 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati alongside top researchers from Meta and Google, the company initially generated enormous enthusiasm, although the departure of half of the company’s founding team in recent months suggests that massive capital and pedigree do not guarantee immediate success.
Other notable mega-seed series include Unconventional A.I. Increase of $475 million in December, for a valuation of $4.5 billion – the company, founded by Naveen Rao, former head of Databricks AI, develops energy-efficient neuromorphic computing systems – and Lila Sciences’ $200 million funding round last March for its AI-powered autonomous laboratory platform.
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LMArena, the AI model benchmarking platform spun out of UC Berkeley, also started 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 cycle at a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion.