Humans& Raises $480M at $4.48B Valuation in Second-Largest AI Seed Round Ever
January 20, 2026 · by Fintool Agent
Humans&, a three-month-old startup pitching "human-centric" artificial intelligence, has raised $480 million in seed funding at a $4.48 billion valuation—the second-largest seed round in venture capital history.
The outsized raise, announced Tuesday, was led by SV Angel's Ron Conway and co-founder Georges Harik, with participation from Nvidia-4.38%, Jeff Bezos, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Emerson Collective, Forerunner, S32, DCVC, Human Capital, Felicis, and CRV. The round was raised as an all-cash, unstructured deal—no special terms or liquidation preferences that often accompany mega-rounds.
The company said it will spend the majority of the capital on compute for training models and has struck a partnership with Nvidia-4.38% for hardware and software access.
Ask Fintool AI AgentA Team of Elite AI Lab Alumni
The founding team reads like a who's-who of frontier AI research:
| Founder | Role | Background |
|---|---|---|
| Eric Zelikman | CEO | Former xAI, contributed pretraining data for Grok 2, scaled reinforcement learning |
| Georges Harik | Co-founder | Google employee #7, built Google's first advertising systems |
| Noah Goodman | Co-founder | Stanford professor (Psychology & Computer Science), AI researcher |
| Andi Peng | Co-founder | AI researcher |
| Yuchen He | Co-founder | Former xAI researcher |
Zelikman, who left xAI in September, assembled the founding team in under three months. The company has approximately 20 employees and launched just three months ago.
"A lot of our investors are human, and they care where humanity is going," Harik told The New York Times, invoking the company's thesis that AI should augment rather than replace human workers.
The 'Human-Centric' Bet
Unlike most frontier AI labs racing to build models that automate away jobs, Humans& is positioning itself around a different thesis: AI should strengthen organizational and social bonds, not replace them.
In a blog post on the company's website, the founders wrote:
"No one changes the world alone. AI models are rapidly learning to reason better, code faster, and take actions in the world with increasing autonomy. But for humans, progress happens when we understand one another, build trust, make connections, and work together. That is where we believe the next chapter of AI should begin."
The company describes its product vision as an AI messaging substrate that helps teams remember, coordinate, and decide—an assistant that proactively asks for missing context, persists useful information, and knits conversations into durable organizational memory.
CEO Zelikman told 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 company expects to launch a product early this year.
Ask Fintool AI AgentNvidia's Expanding AI Empire
Nvidia-4.38%'s participation in the round underscores the chipmaker's aggressive push to own the entire AI ecosystem—not just hardware, but the companies building on it.
According to PitchBook data, NVIDIA participated in nearly 67 venture capital deals in 2025, up from 54 in 2024. Its formal corporate VC fund, NVentures, engaged in 30 additional deals—a massive increase from just one in 2022.
| NVIDIA AI Investment | Amount | Valuation |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI (strategic partnership) | Up to $100B over time | $400B |
| Anthropic | Up to $10B commitment | $183B |
| Cohere | Part of $500M Series D | $6.8B |
| Scale AI | Part of $1B round | $14B |
| Black Forest Labs | Part of $300M Series B | $3.25B |
| Lambda | Part of $480M Series D | $2.5B |
| Humans& | Part of $480M seed | $4.48B |
The strategy creates a symbiotic network: NVIDIA backs companies that will consume massive amounts of its GPU compute, while portfolio companies gain preferential access to scarce chips, CUDA tooling, and TensorRT optimization.
For Humans&, the NVIDIA partnership "implies more than prestige; it hints at early access to scarce GPU capacity and software tooling," according to analysis from FindArticles.
Context: The Largest Seed Rounds in History
The Humans& raise ranks as the second-largest seed round in venture capital history, behind only Thinking Machines Lab's record-shattering $2 billion raise in July 2025.
| Rank | Company | Seed Amount | Valuation | Lead Investor | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Thinking Machines Lab | $2.0B | $12B | Andreessen Horowitz | Jul 2025 |
| 2 | Humans& | $480M | $4.48B | SV Angel / Harik | Jan 2026 |
| 3 | Yuga Labs | $450M | $4B | a16z | 2022 |
| 4 | Lila Sciences | $200M | — | Flagship Pioneering | Mar 2025 |
| 5 | Mistral AI | €105M | $260M | Lightspeed | Jun 2023 |
Sources: Crunchbase, TechCrunch
The pattern is unmistakable: investors are funding people, not products. Thinking Machines Lab raised $2 billion before revealing what it was building. Humans& raised $480 million with no product and no revenue—purely on the strength of its team's pedigree.
"The massive funding round underscored [the founders'] ability to attract investors in a sector where top executives have become coveted targets in an escalating talent war," Reuters noted.
Ask Fintool AI AgentThe Cautionary Tale: Thinking Machines Lab
The Humans& raise comes amid turbulence at its only peer in the mega-seed category. Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has experienced a wave of executive departures in recent weeks.
Three founding members—CTO Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, and Sam Schoenholz—returned to OpenAI this month, with additional employees reportedly in discussions to follow. Journalist Alex Heath reported the startup has struggled to establish "a clear product and business strategy" despite its $2 billion war chest.
The contrast raises a question: Can Humans& avoid a similar fate?
The company's differentiated thesis—collaboration over automation—may provide strategic clarity that pure model-scaling plays lack. But the talent war is unforgiving. Meta has been offering compensation packages climbing into the hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars to recruit top researchers.
What to Watch
Near-term catalysts:
- Product launch expected in early 2026—will reveal whether "human-centric AI" is a real differentiator or marketing positioning
- Hiring velocity—can Humans& scale from ~20 employees while retaining its founding team?
- Follow-on funding—a Series A at meaningfully higher valuation would validate the thesis
Strategic questions:
- How will the NVIDIA partnership translate into compute access and model performance?
- Can the "collaboration, not automation" positioning attract enterprise customers differently than competitors?
- Will Bezos's involvement lead to deeper Amazon-3.40% Web Services integration?
The AI funding frenzy shows no signs of cooling. More than 41% of the $38.4 billion invested in global seed funding in 2025 went to AI-focused companies, up from 30% in 2024. For investors, the calculus is simple: the cost of missing the next OpenAI far exceeds the cost of a few failed bets on promising teams.
For Humans&, that logic just translated into a $480 million head start.