In a funding round that underscores the relentless investor fervor for artificial intelligence ventures, three-month-old startup Humans& has secured $480 million in seed capital, catapulting its valuation to $4.48 billion.
The deal, announced on January 20, 2026, positions the company as a “human-centric frontier AI lab” dedicated to reimagining AI as a tool that amplifies human relationships and collaboration, rather than supplanting them.
This massive infusion of cash, one of the largest seed rounds in tech history, reflects a broader trend of capital flooding into spinouts led by alumni from the sector’s heavyweight labs, even as debates swirl about inflated valuations in the AI space.
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Humans&’s philosophy centers on developing AI that serves as “deeper connective tissue” for organizations and communities, emphasizing empowerment over automation.
The company aims to rethink large-scale model training and human-AI interactions, with key innovations targeted at long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory systems, and user understanding.
By tightly integrating scientific research with product development, Humans& seeks to create software that facilitates seamless collaboration—envisioned as an AI-enhanced instant messaging app or similar tools where chatbots can request information from users, store it persistently, and apply it contextually over time.
This approach contrasts sharply with more autonomous AI paradigms pursued by some competitors, as co-founder Andi Peng highlighted in explaining her departure from Anthropic: “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. That was never my motivation. I think of machines and humans as complementary.”
The founding team, comprising around 20 members with pedigrees from the AI elite, brings a wealth of expertise to this mission.
- Core co-founders include: Andi Peng, a former Anthropic research scientist who advanced reinforcement learning and post-training for Claude models from 3.5 through 4.5.
- Georges Harik, Google’s seventh employee, instrumental in building its foundational advertising systems like AdWords and AdSense.
- Eric Zelikman and Yuchen He, ex-xAI researchers who contributed to the development of the Grok chatbot.
- Noah Goodman, a Stanford professor specializing in psychology and computer science, is bridging cognitive science with AI.
The broader team expands this foundation, featuring talents such as Alexis Ross, Ani Nrusimha, Charlie George, Diyi Yang, Jeremy Berman, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Ray Ramadorai, Rob Li, Saurabh Shah, Taylor Sorensen, Varuna Jayasiri, Weisi Duan, and Ziang Li.
Their collective experience spans xAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Meta, Reflection, the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), Stanford, and MIT, creating a powerhouse ensemble poised to challenge conventional AI trajectories.
The seed round was led by Ron Conway’s SV Angel and co-founder Georges Harik, drawing a star-studded roster of backers that blends corporate heavyweights with influential individuals.
Institutional investors include Nvidia, GV (Google Ventures), Emerson Collective (Laurene Powell Jobs’s firm), Forerunner, S32, DCVC, Human Capital, Liquid 2, Felicis, CRV, Exoscaleton (in partnership with Acrew), AME Cloud Ventures (founded by Jerry Yang), Palo Alto Growth Capital, Conviction, Bloomberg Beta, E14, A&E Investment, and Zeta Holdings.
High-profile individual participants feature Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, alongside Eric Zelikman, Anne Wojcicki (23andMe co-founder), Ralph Harik, Sarah Liang, Bill Maris (former GV CEO), Marissa Mayer (ex-Yahoo CEO), James Hong, Stephen Balaban, Ying Sheng, David Wallerstein, Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face co-founder), Mitesh Agrawal, Nikola Petrov Borisov, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Igor Babuschkin (ex-OpenAI), Itamar Arel, Sharon Zhou, Thomas Reardon, Zak Stone, and Logan Kilpatrick (ex-OpenAI).
This eclectic mix signals robust confidence in Humans&’s vision, particularly from those embedded in the AI ecosystem. The company’s sparse website offers a glimpse into its innovative ethos, featuring a simulation of cultural dissemination inspired by the Axelrod model, with parameters for interaction, social repulsion, and cultural noise.
This visualization hints at the lab’s interest in modeling complex human dynamics through AI. Humans& has also committed to contributing to open-source projects and academic research, while actively recruiting “world-class talent” to fuel its growth.
This funding arrives amid a surge in mega-rounds for AI breakaways, following similar hauls by ventures like Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence (valued at $32 billion in 2025) and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab ($12 billion seed).
Yet, the eye-watering valuation has sparked skepticism, with observers on platforms like Hacker News labeling it a symptom of a “bubble in private valuations of AI startups.”
Industry analysts note that while the capital enables aggressive pursuit of compute-heavy research, the pressure to deliver breakthroughs in interactive, user-aware AI will be immense. Humans& plans to launch its first product early this year, though details remain under wraps.