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.