Ex-OpenAI researchers’ Humans& raises $480M: Can it beat Thinking Machines Lab?
- ByStartupStory | January 23, 2026
AI startup Humans& has raised $480 million in a seed funding round, pushing its valuation to $4.48 billion. The round was led by SV Angel, with backing from investor Ron Conway and Humans& co-founder Georges Harik. Other participants include Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and GV.
According to sources, the deal highlights how investors are now betting on “next-generation AI labs” that aim to build systems more advanced than today’s chatbots or basic AI agents. Many of these startups are being launched by researchers who previously worked at the world’s leading AI companies.
NVIDIA’s involvement is notable, especially after its investment in Baseten. The chipmaker has become a major backer of AI startups as demand for its computing hardware continues to surge.
What Humans& is building?
Humans& was founded in late 2025 by a team from top AI labs: Eric Zelikman (ex-xAI, worked on Grok-2 pretraining and RL scaling), Georges Harik (Google employee #7, key to Gmail/Android/advertising), Andi Peng (ex-Anthropic, Claude RL/post-training), Yuchen He (ex-xAI), and Noah Goodman (Stanford professor in psych/CS).
Humans& is positioning itself as a human-centric AI company — “AI for humans,” focused on improving how people communicate, collaborate, and work together.
“No one changes the world alone. AI models are rapidly learning to reason more effectively, code faster, and take actions in the world with greater autonomy. But for humans, progress happens when we understand one another, build trust, make connections, and work together,” says the company.
Instead of replacing humans, the company says its AI is designed to work alongside people and other AI systems. Humans& enters a heated “next-gen AI lab” race against mega-seed peers like Thinking Machines Lab, Unconventional AI, and Lila Sciences. Broader rivals include model builders like Anthropic, xAI, and Adept.
According to its website, Humans& is building AI systems that act more like collaborators than tools. The company believes that future AI should understand context, intent, and human dynamics, helping teams think more clearly, make decisions faster, and work more creatively. Humans& plans to launch its first product early this year.
“That is where we believe the next chapter of AI should begin. This requires rethinking everything about how we train models at scale and how people interact with AI. This needs innovations in long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory, and user understanding,” concludes the company.
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