Humans&, an AI startup founded by former researchers from OpenAI, Alphabet, and xAI, just closed a $480 million seed financing round that values the company at $4.48 billion. The announcement came Tuesday, marking one of the largest seed rounds in AI startup history and underlining just how hungry investors are for next-generation AI companies led by proven talent.
The size of this seed round is remarkable even by current standards. While mega-rounds have become more common in AI, a nearly half-billion-dollar raise at the seed stage signals exceptional confidence from investors who are betting big on the team’s ability to build something beyond the chatbots and agentic tools currently flooding the market.
Who’s Backing Humans&
The round was led by Ron Conway’s SV Angel and co-founder Georges Harik, with participation from some of the biggest names in tech and venture capital. Nvidia joined as an investor, continuing its pattern of backing AI startups that rely heavily on its computing hardware. As demand for Nvidia’s chips has surged, the company has emerged as a strategic investor in the AI ecosystem, taking stakes in companies that are likely to become major customers.
Jeff Bezos also participated in the round, along with GV, Alphabet’s venture capital arm, and several other venture investors. When you can pull in both the chipmaker powering AI infrastructure and the founder of one of the world’s largest cloud providers, you’re doing something right.
The Team Behind the Company
Humans& is led by CEO Eric Zelikman, who previously worked at Elon Musk’s xAI where he contributed to training data for Grok-2. His research background includes work on reasoning-focused reinforcement learning methods—the kind of technical foundation that suggests the company isn’t just iterating on existing models but potentially exploring new approaches to AI development.
Co-founder Georges Harik brings serious Silicon Valley credibility. He was Google’s seventh employee and played a central role in the company’s early growth during its most formative years. At Google, he worked on the launch of Gmail, initiated what would become Google Docs, and led the acquisition of Android. That’s the kind of product instinct and strategic vision that can turn ambitious technical ideas into products people actually use.
The broader founding team includes researchers and engineers from major AI labs and institutions like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta. When you’re pulling talent from that roster, you’re not just hiring people who understand AI—you’re assembling a team that helped define the current state of the field.
What Humans& Is Actually Building
Humans& says it’s working on human-centric AI tools for communication and collaboration, with plans to launch a product early this year. That timeline is aggressive, but given the team’s pedigree and the amount of capital they’ve raised, they’re probably not starting from scratch.
“The model will coordinate with people, and other AIs where appropriate, in order to allow people to do more and to bring them together,” Zelikman told reporters. That framing suggests they’re thinking beyond individual productivity tools toward something more collaborative—AI that helps teams work together rather than just automating individual tasks.
The details are still vague, which is typical for a company at this stage. But the emphasis on coordination and bringing people together hints at a different approach than the current wave of AI assistants that primarily focus on individual user interactions.
Why This Round Matters
The $480 million seed round reflects a broader trend: investors are willing to place massive bets on AI labs founded by veteran researchers, especially when those researchers come from the companies that built the current generation of AI systems. There’s a belief that the people who helped create GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and other frontier models know something about where AI is heading next—and are best positioned to build it.
Whether Humans& can justify a $4.5 billion valuation before shipping a product remains to be seen. But with this much capital, backing from strategic investors like Nvidia, and a team that’s already proven they can build cutting-edge AI systems, they’ve got the resources and credibility to take a serious swing at whatever they’re building.
For now, the market’s voting with its checkbook—and betting that Zelikman, Harik, and their team have figured out something worth nearly half a billion dollars to explore.
