humans& raises a $480M seed at $4.48B for human-centric AI

SV Angel, Ron Conway's firm, led the round with co-founder Georges Harik. Emerson Collective, Forerunner, DCVC, Felicis and CRV also took part. The deal was all cash, with none of the liquidation preferences that often come with mega-rounds. Most of the capital is earmarked for training compute, and a partnership with Nvidia covers hardware and software access.

The company was three months old, had roughly 20 employees and had shipped no product. Its founders came from Anthropic, xAI, Google and Stanford. Research targets long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory systems and user understanding. It ranks as the second-largest seed round on record, behind Thinking Machines Lab's $2B at a $12B valuation in July 2025.

For founders, the round shows that a research team with a clear thesis can still raise nine figures on clean terms before it has revenue. The thesis is that models should be built to coordinate people, not work alone. The cost is a crowded field. Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic are all building workplace AI assistants. A chipmaker as investor and compute partner also shows how closely capital and hardware access are now tied for new labs.