Humans&, a “human-centric” AI startup founded by Anthropic, xAI, and Google alumni, raises $480 million in seed round

Humans&, a startup whose philosophy is that AI should empower humans rather than replace them, has raised $480 million in seed funding at a valuation of $4.48 billion, The New York Times reported. Investors in the round include chipmaker Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, venture capital firms SV Angel, GV and Laurene Powell Jobs’ company Emerson Collective.

The three-month-old company’s mega deal follows a trend of investors pouring money into startups founded by independents of major AI labs. Humans& founders include Andi Peng, a former human researcher who worked on reinforcement learning and post-training for Claude 3.5-4.5. Georges Halik, Google’s seventh employee who helped build the first advertising system. Eric Zelikman and Yucheng He, two former xAI researchers who contributed to the development of the Grok chatbot. Noah Goodman, professor of psychology and computer science at Stanford University.

The company says its 20-plus employees also come from OpenAI, Meta, Reflection, AI2, and MIT. The startup aims to use software to help people collaborate with each other. Think of it as 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 that request information from users and store it for later use.

Humans& wants to reimagine “how models are trained at scale and how people interact with AI,” in order to build AI that acts as “deeper connective tissue that powers organizations and communities,” its webpage says. The company cited the need for innovation in “long-term and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory, and user understanding,” as well as a tightly integrated focus on both science and product development.

TechCrunch has requested comment.

Although the Humans& seed round is huge, it is by no means an outlier in the current AI funding environment. The largest seed round in history to date comes from Thinking Machines Lab, which raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation last July and was led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company, founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati with top researchers from Meta and Google, initially attracted a lot of enthusiasm, but the departure of half the founding team in recent months suggests that big capital and pedigree don’t guarantee immediate success.

Other notable mega-seed rounds include Unconventional AI’s $475 million raise in December at a $4.5 billion valuation (the company, founded by former Databricks AI head Naveen Rao, develops energy-efficient neuromorphic computing systems) and Lila Sciences’ $200 million seed round last March for its autonomous AI-powered laboratory platform.

LMArena, an AI model benchmarking platform spun out of the University of California, Berkeley, similarly started as a commercial venture, raising $100 million last May at a $600 million valuation. Earlier this month, the three-year-old company announced a $150 million Series A round at a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion.