Humans&, a ‘human-centric’ AI startup founded by Anthropic, xAI, Google alums, raised $480M seed round

People&a startup with the philosophy that AI should empower rather than replace people has 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’ company Emerson Collective.

The mega deal for the three-month-old company follows a trend of investors throwing money at startups founded by leading groups of major AI labs. Humans& founders include Andi Peng, a former anthropic researcher who worked on reinforcement learning and post-training of Claude 3.5 through 4.5; Georges Harik, Google’s seventh employee, who helped build the 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 approximately 20 employees also come from OpenAI, Meta, Reflection, AI2 and MIT, according to the company. The startup wants to use software to let 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.

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-horizon learning and multi-agent reinforcement, memory and user understanding,” as well as a tightly integrated focus on both science and product development.

TechCrunch has reached out for comment.

The Humans& seed round, while huge, is far from an outlier in today’s AI funding environment. The largest seed round in history currently belongs to Thinking Machines Lab, which raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation last July, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati along with top researchers from Meta and Google, the company initially attracted huge enthusiasm, although the departure of half of the company’s founding team in recent months suggests that huge capital and pedigree do not 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, the AI ​​model benchmarking platform spun out of UC Berkeley, similarly emerged as a commercial venture, raising $100 million last May at a $600 million valuation. Earlier this month, the three-year-old team announced a $150 million Series A round with a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion.