humans&, an AI lab started by researchers from xAI, Anthropic, Google and other labs, raised $480m in a seed round at a $4.48bn valuation, Reuters and Crunchbase News reported on 20 January 2026. The company announced the round as it launched publicly.
SV Angel, the firm founded by Ron Conway, led the round together with co-founder Georges Harik. Other investors included NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, GV, Emerson Collective, Forerunner, S32, DCVC, Human Capital, Felicis and CRV, as well as Conviction, Bloomberg Beta and a long list of individual backers, according to the company's website.
Crunchbase News reported that the round was all cash with no structured terms. humans& did not disclose the amount or valuation on its own website.
“The model will coordinate with people, and other AIs where appropriate, in order to allow people to do more and to bring them together.”Eric Zelikman, Co-founder and CEO, humans&
What humans& does
humans& says it is building AI centred on people and their relationships with one another, with tools for communication and collaboration. Reuters reported that it expects to launch a product early in 2026. Pulse 2.0 said the company aims to build an orchestrator that coordinates work between people and AI systems instead of acting alone.
Chief executive Eric Zelikman described the approach to 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," he said. The company says the work needs advances in long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory and user understanding.
Who is behind it
humans& was founded in September 2025, according to Crunchbase News. Its co-founders are Andi Peng, a former Anthropic researcher, Zelikman, Harik, Yuchen He and Noah Goodman.
Zelikman was an early employee at xAI, where he worked on pretraining data for Grok 2 and on reinforcement learning for later Grok models, Pulse 2.0 reported. Harik was Google's seventh employee and worked on the launch of Gmail, started Google Docs and led the acquisition of Android, according to Reuters. The company says its team has also worked at Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Meta, AI2, Stanford and MIT. It did not disclose its headcount or headquarters city.
Individual investors listed on the website include Anne Wojcicki, Marissa Mayer, Bill Maris and Logan Kilpatrick.
What the money is for
Peng told Crunchbase News that most of the capital will go to compute for training models. NVIDIA is also a hardware and software partner, Crunchbase News reported.
Crunchbase News said the round is believed to be one of the largest seed rounds ever. The largest in its data is Thinking Machines Lab's $2bn seed round at a $10bn valuation in 2025. AI companies took more than 41% of the $38.4bn in global seed funding in 2025, up from 30% in 2024, according to Crunchbase data.
Crunchbase News also reported that AI seed funding passed $15bn by 12 December 2025, about 50% more than in 2024, and that US seed rounds of $100m or more totalled a record of more than $3.6bn in 2025.
Company website: humansand.ai