AI chatbots are getting better at answering questions, summarizing documents, and solving mathematical equations, but they still largely behave like helpful assistants for one user at a time. They\u2019re not designed to manage the messier work of real collaboration: coordinating people with competing priorities, tracking long-running decisions, and keeping teams aligned over time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Humans&, a new startup founded by alumni of Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind, thinks closing that gap is the next major frontier for foundation models. The company this week raised a $480 million seed round<\/a> to build a \u201ccentral nervous system\u201d for the human-plus-AI economy. The startup\u2019s \u201cAI for empowering humans<\/a>\u201d framing has dominated early coverage, but the company\u2019s actual ambition is more novel: building a new foundation model architecture designed for social intelligence, not just information retrieval or code generation.<\/p>\n \u201cIt feels like we\u2019re ending the first paradigm of scaling, where question-answering models were trained to be very smart at particular verticals, and now we\u2019re entering what we believe to be the second wave of adoption where the average consumer or user is trying to figure out what to do with all these things,\u201d Andi Peng, one of humans&\u2019s co-founders and a former Anthropic employee, told TechCrunch.\u00a0<\/p>\n Humans&\u2019s pitch centers on helping usher people into the new era of AI, moving beyond the narrative that AI will take their jobs. Whether or not that\u2019s just marketing speak, the timing is critical: Companies are transitioning from chat to agents. Models are competent, but workflows aren\u2019t, and the coordination challenge remains largely unaddressed. And through it all, people feel threatened and overwhelmed by AI.<\/p>\n The three-month-old company, like several of its peers, has managed to raise its startling seed round off the back of this philosophy and the pedigree of its founding team. Humans& still doesn\u2019t have a product, nor has it been clear about what exactly it might be, though the team said it could be a replacement for multiplayer or multi-user contexts like communication platforms (think Slack<\/a>) or collaboration platforms (think Google Docs and Notion). As for use cases and target audience, the team hinted at both enterprise and consumer applications.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe are building a product and a model that is centered on communication and collaboration,\u201d Eric Zelikman, co-founder and CEO of humans& and former xAI researcher, told TechCrunch, adding that the focus is on getting the product to help people work together and communicate more effectively \u2014 both with each other and with AI tools.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cLike when you have to make a large group decision, often it comes down to someone taking everyone into one room, getting everyone to express their different camps about, for example, what kind of logo they\u2019d like,\u201d Zelikman continued, chortling with his team as they recalled the time-consuming tedium of getting everyone to agree on a logo for the startup.\u00a0<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco Zelikman added that the new model will be trained to ask questions in a way that feels like interacting with a friend or a colleague, someone who is trying to get to know you. Chatbots today are programmed to ask questions constantly, but they do so without understanding the value of the question. He says this is because they\u2019ve been optimized for two things: How much a user immediately likes a response they\u2019re given, and how likely the model is to answer the question it receives correctly.\u00a0<\/p>\n Part of the lack of clarity around what the product is could be that humans& doesn\u2019t exactly have an answer for that yet. Peng said humans& is designing the product in conjunction with the model.<\/p>\n \u201cPart of what we\u2019re doing here is also making sure that as the model improves, we\u2019re able to co-evolve the interface and the behaviors that the model is capable of into a product that makes sense,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n What is clear, though, is that humans& isn\u2019t trying to make a new model that can plug into existing applications and collaboration tools. The startup wants to own the collaboration layer.\u00a0<\/p>\n AI plus team collaboration and productivity tools are an increasingly hot field \u2014 for example, the startup AI note-taking app Granola raised a $43 million round<\/a> at a $250 million valuation as it launched more collaborative features. Several high-profile voices are also explicitly framing the next phase of AI as one of coordination and collaboration, not just automation. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman today argued that companies are implementing AI wrong by treating it like isolated pilots and that the real leverage is in the coordination layer of work \u2014 that is, how teams share knowledge and run meetings.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAI lives at the workflow level, and the people closest to the work know where the friction actually is,\u201d Hoffman wrote on social media<\/a>. \u201cThey\u2019re the ones who will discover what should be automated, compressed, or totally redesigned.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s the space where humans& wants to live. The idea is that its model-slash-product would act as the \u201cconnective tissue\u201d across any organization \u2014 be it a 10,000-person business or a family \u2014 that understands the skills, motivations, and needs of each person, as well as how all of those can be balanced for the good of the whole.<\/p>\n To get there requires rethinking how AI models are trained.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re trying to train the model in a different way that will involve more humans and AIs interacting and collaborating together,\u201d Yuchen He, a humans& co-founder and former OpenAI researcher, told TechCrunch, adding that the startup\u2019s model will also be trained using long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL).<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n