Jan 20 (Reuters) - AI startup Humans&, founded by former OpenAI, Alphabet and xAI researchers, has raised $480 million in a seed financing round, which values the company at $4.48 billion, it said on Tuesday.
The outsized seed round highlights intense investor interest in next-generation AI labs founded by veteran researchers as companies race to build systems that go beyond chatbots and agentic tools.
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The round was led by Ron Conway's SV Angel and co-founder Georges Harik, while Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, Alphabet's VC arm, GV, among other venture capital investors, also participated.
Nvidia has emerged as a key backer of AI startups as demand for its chips surges, taking stakes in companies that rely heavily on its computing hardware.
Humans& said it was working on human-centric AI tools for communication and collaboration, and expects to launch a product early this year.
"The model will coordinate with people, and other AIs where appropriate, in order to allow people to do more and to bring them together," CEO Eric Zelikman told Reuters.
The company's founding team includes researchers and engineers from major AI labs and institutions such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta.
Harik was Google's seventh employee and played a central role in the company's early growth. He worked on the launch of Gmail, initiated Google Docs and led Google's acquisition of Android.
Zelikman, also a co-founder, had previously worked at Elon Musk's xAI, where he contributed to training data for Grok-2. His research background includes work on reasoning-focused reinforcement learning methods.