Humans&, a human-centric AI startup founded by Anthropic, xAI, and Google alums, has raised $480 million in a seed round

Humans&, a startup with a philosophy that AI should empower people rather than replace them, has raised $480 million in seed funding at a $4.48 billion valuation, according to the New York Times. Investors in the round include chipmaker Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, venture capital firms SV Angel, GV, and Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective.

The three-month-old company’s blockbuster deal follows a trend of investors spending money on startups founded by spinoffs from major AI labs. Humans’ co-founders include Andy Peng, a former anthropologist who worked on reinforcement learning and post-training for Cloud 3.5 to 4.5; George Harrick, Google’s seventh employee, who helped build the company’s first advertising systems; Eric Zelekman and Yuchen He, former XAI researchers who helped develop the chatbot Grok; and Noah Goodman, professor of psychology and computer science at Stanford University.

The company’s 20 employees also come from OpenAI, Meta, Reflection, AI2 and MIT, according to the company. The startup aims to use software to help people collaborate with each other—think an AI version of an instant messaging app. One of their goals is to use existing AI techniques to train AI in new ways, such as programming chatbots to request information from the user and store it for later use.

In order to build AI that acts “as a deeper connective tissue that strengthens organizations and societies,” Humans& hopes to rethink “how models are trained at scale and how people interact with AI,” according to the company’s webpage. The startup cited the need for innovations in “long-term, multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory, and user understanding,” as well as an integrated focus on both science and product development.

TechCrunch has reached out for comment.

The humans-seed round, while large, is still far from an anomaly in the current AI funding environment. The largest seed round in history, at the moment, belongs to Thinking Machines Lab, which raised $2 billion last July at a $12 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Moratti alongside senior researchers from Meta and Google, the company initially attracted huge enthusiasm, although the departure of half of the company’s founding team in recent months suggests that massive capital and pedigree don’t guarantee immediate success.

Other large seed rounds include Unconventional AI’s $475 million raise in December at a $4.5 billion valuation — the company, founded by former Databricks AI chief Naveen Rao, develops energy-efficient neural computing systems — and a $200 million seed round from Lila Sciences last March for its autonomous AI-powered lab platform.

Likewise, LMArena, the AI ​​model benchmarking platform that spun out of UC Berkeley, came out of the gate as a commercial venture, raising $100 million at a $600 million valuation last May. Earlier this month, the three-year-old company announced a $150 million Series A round at a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion.