Newly launched AI startup Humans& raises $480M round backed by Nvidia, GV. Humans& Inc., a three-month-old artificial intelligence startup, today announced that it has closed a $480 million seed round at a $4.48 billion valuation. The investment was led by SV Angel and Georges Harik, one of the company's founders. Harik, an early Google LLC employee, helped develop several of the search giant's core services. Google parent Alphabet Inc. participated in the round through its GV fund alongside Nvidia Corp., Jeff Bezos and more than a half-dozen others. The initial Humans& team comprises about 20 AI experts. They joined the company from OpenAI Group PBC, Anthropic PBC, Meta Platforms Inc. and other major players in the AI market. Humans& says its researchers are developing neural networks that will make workers more productive. According to the New York Times, the company's models will speed up collaboration-related tasks and online research. They are also expected to automate "other tasks that suit machines." In a blog post, the company hinted that one of its goals is to equip its AI software with the ability to perform long-horizon activities. Those are complex tasks that take large language models hours or more to complete. Long-horizon processing is a major focus of machine learning researchers. Google, for example, recently revealed that it has developed an AI model design specifically optimized for long-horizon use cases. The architecture's flagship feature is a component called a metacontroller. When an AI model is given a long-horizon task, the metacontroller generates software modules that optimize the model's reasoning workflow. Humans& also plans to equip its software with support for multi-agent use cases. That means its AI models will be capable of collaborating with other neural networks on multistep tasks. Additionally, the company's models will proactively ask workers for the information necessary to complete a given task. Humans& plans to train its algorithms using reinforcement learning. That's a training approach commonly used by researchers to develop reasoning models. In a reinforcement learning project, an AI completes a set of training tasks and receives positive or negative feedback depending on how well it completes a given chore. The algorithm uses that feedback to hone its output quality. Unlike certain other development methods, reinforcement learning doesn't require researchers to enrich their training data with explanatory labels, which lowers costs. However, it can still be capital-intensive because of the large number of graphics cards often needed to train reasoning models. That might be one of the reasons Humans& has raised such a large seed round. The Times reported that the company plans to launch its first product early this year. A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE: Support its mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE's Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities. * 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more * 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni - Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network. SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios - with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange - SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI. Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Its new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.

AI startup Humans& raises $480M seed at $4.48B valuation as former OpenAI and Google researchers launch frontier AI lab. Everyone is talking about AI taking jobs. A new AI startup says that narrative misses the point. Humans&, founded by former OpenAI and Google researchers, claims its mission is to empower workers, not replace them. Investors are betting big on that vision. The company just raised a staggering $480 million seed round, pushing its valuation to $4.48 billion - a rare figure for a startup that has yet to ship its first product. The message from investors is loud and clear. Money is flooding into teams led by researchers who helped shape today's most influential AI systems. The next race is no longer about chatbots or task agents. It's about building frontier labs capable of pushing AI into new territory. Nvidia and Bezos back Humans& in $480M seed for frontier AI lab. The funding round was led by SV Angel, the venture firm founded by legendary early-stage investor Ron Conway, alongside Humans & Co-founder Georges Harik. The cap table reads like a who's who of tech power brokers. Jeff Bezos joined the round. Nvidia wrote a check. Alphabet's venture arm, GV, also came in. Nvidia's presence is no accident. The chip giant has quietly become one of the most active backers of AI startups. Demand for its GPUs keeps climbing, and Nvidia now takes equity stakes in companies that depend on its infrastructure. Owning part of the future AI stack has become a strategic move. Bloomberg described the raise as "an unusually large haul for a young startup," pointing to how rare it is to see seed rounds stretch into the hundreds of millions. The company is based in San Francisco and confirmed it will work closely with Nvidia on both hardware and software, a partnership that signals serious compute ambitions from day one. "The new company, Humans&, has embraced the notion that A.I. should empower people rather than replace them. The founders said their goal was to build software that facilitated collaboration between people - like an A.I. version of an instant messaging app - while also helping with internet searches and other tasks that suit machines," The New York Times wrote. Humans& says it is building human-centric AI tools aimed at communication and collaboration. The startup plans to launch its first product early this year. CEO Eric Zelikman offered a glimpse of what's coming in an interview with Reuters: "The model will coordinate with people, and other AIs where appropriate, in order to allow people to do more and to bring them together." The founding team brings a deep pedigree. Engineers and researchers hail from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta. This isn't a group learning AI from scratch. These are people who helped build the systems powering today's boom. Georges Harik's resume alone reads like Silicon Valley history. He was Google's seventh employee and played a major role in the company's early growth. His fingerprints are all over products millions use daily. He worked on Gmail, kick-started Google Docs, and led Google's acquisition of Android. Zelikman, the other co-founder, previously worked at Elon Musk's xAI. He contributed to the Grok-2 training data and has a research background in reasoning-based reinforcement learning. That blend of academic rigor and hands-on model training sits at the core of Humans&'s vision. Investors see something bigger than another AI app. They see a lab. A place where foundational systems get built, not just wrapped. The scale of this seed round reflects a belief that the next AI breakthroughs will come from small, elite teams with deep technical roots and massive computing budgets. Whether Humans& can live up to that promise remains to be seen. Shipping a product will be the real test. Still, raising nearly half a billion dollars before launch sends a clear signal. In today's AI market, pedigree plus ambition can move mountains of capital.

Founded by researchers from Anthropic, Google and xAI, the new company, Humans&, is already valued at $4.48 billion.