Today humans& announced it officially launching, which is a new company founded by leading researchers from Google, Anthropic, xAI, OpenAI, Meta, and other top labs and academic institutions. In an announcement sent to Pulse 2.0, the company said it has raised $480 million in a seed round of funding at a valuation of $4.48 billion. The round was led by SV Angel and co-founder Georges Harik, with participation from NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, GV (Google Ventures), Emerson Collective, Forerunner, S32, DCVC, Human Capital, Felicis, and CRV, among others. And this financing is one of the largest seed rounds in the AI industry.
What does the company do? humans& is building human-centric AI designed around how people connect and work together—keeping collaboration and human insight at the center.
A bit more on what they’re building:
— A human-centric AI lab focused on setting a new standard for how AI supports human connection
— A tool that serves as “connective tissue,” enabling smoother collaboration between people and intelligent systems
— An orchestrator that coordinates workflows rather than trying to be the sole actor
Founding team: The founding team includes researchers and engineers with backgrounds at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta.
The company co-founder and CEO Eric Zelikman was an early employee of xAI and was a key contributor to the pretraining data for Grok 2 and also oversaw scaling reinforcement learning for reasoning for Grok 3 Thinking. He also built the agent RL infrastructure for Grok 4. Before that, he was a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford. While there, he wrote STaR, the first paper to train language models to reason in natural language using their own rationales.
