By Akash Sriram<\/p>\n
Jan 20 (Reuters) – AI startup Humans&, founded by former OpenAI<\/a>, Alphabet and xAI researchers, has raised $480 million \u200bin a seed financing round, which values the company \u200cat $4.48 billion, it said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n The outsized seed round highlights intense investor interest \u200cin next-generation AI labs founded by veteran researchers as companies race to build systems that go beyond chatbots and agentic tools.<\/p>\n The round was led by Ron Conway’s SV Angel and co-founder Georges Harik, \u2060while Nvidia<\/a>, Jeff Bezos<\/a>, \u200cAlphabet’s VC arm, GV, among other venture capital investors, also participated.<\/p>\n Nvidia has emerged as a key backer \u200dof AI startups as demand for its chips surges, taking stakes in companies that rely heavily on its computing hardware.<\/p>\n Humans& said it was working \u200bon human-centric AI tools for communication and collaboration, and expects \u200cto launch a product early this year.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n The company’s founding team includes researchers and engineers from \u2060major AI labs and institutions such \u200bas OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and \u200bMeta.<\/p>\n Harik was Google’s seventh employee and played a central role in the company’s early growth. He worked on \u200dthe launch of \u2060Gmail, initiated Google Docs and led Google’s acquisition of Android.<\/p>\n Zelikman, also a co-founder, had previously worked at Elon Musk’s xAI, \u2060where he contributed to training data for Grok-2. His research background includes \u200cwork on reasoning-focused reinforcement learning methods.<\/p>\n (Reporting by Akash Sriram in \u200cBengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Akash Sriram Jan 20 (Reuters) – AI startup Humans&, founded by former OpenAI, Alphabet and xAI researchers,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":248339,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,132767,85,46,4136,100428,132768,125,132769],"class_list":["post-248338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-georges-harik","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-nvidia","tag-ron-conway","tag-seed-financing-round","tag-technology","tag-veteran-researchers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248338\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}