AI Startup Humans& Secures $480 Million Seed Funding at $4.48 Billion Valuation
San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup Humans& raised $480 million in a seed funding round that values the three-month-old company at $4.48 billion.
 |
| Credit: Humans& |
The round drew investments from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos and Alphabet's venture capital arm GV, among others.
SV Angel and co-founder Georges Harik led the financing. Other participants included Laurene Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective, Forerunner Ventures, S32, DCV, Human Capital and Liquid 2 Ventures.
The company disclosed the funding details on its website on January 20, 2026.
"The model will coordinate with people, and other AIs where appropriate, in order to allow people to do more and to bring them together," said CEO Eric Zelikman.
Founders of Humans& include Andi Peng, who served as a research scientist at Anthropic and worked on reinforcement learning and post-training for Claude models 3.5 through 4.5. Georges Harik joined as Google's seventh employee and contributed to its first advertising systems, the launch of Gmail, the initiation of Google Docs and the acquisition of Android.
Eric Zelikman and Yuchen He previously worked as researchers at xAI and helped develop the Grok chatbot.
Noah Goodman holds positions as a Stanford University professor of psychology and computer science.
The founding team also draws from OpenAI, Meta, Reflection, AI2 and MIT, with about 20 employees in total.
Humans& develops human-centric AI tools focused on communication and collaboration. The company plans to launch a product early in 2026.
It aims to create systems that extend beyond chatbots and agentic tools. The startup seeks innovations in long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory and user understanding.
"Anthropic is training its model to work autonomously. It loved to highlight how its models churned for eight hours, 24 hours, 50 hours by itself to complete a task," Ms. Peng said. "That was never my motivation. I think of machines and humans as complementary."
The company intends to contribute to open source and academic research.
