By Rebecca Bellan
Publication Date: 2026-01-20 16:00:00
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, reports The New York Times. Investors in the round include chipmaker Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and VC firms SV Angel, Google Ventures, and Laurene Powell Jobs’ firm Emerson Collective.
The megadeal for the three-month-old company follows a trend of investors throwing money at startups founded by breakaways of major AI labs. Humans&’s founders include Andi Peng, a former Anthropic researcher who worked on reinforcement learning and post-training of Claude 3.5 through 4.5; Georges Harik, Google’s seventh employee, who helped build its first advertising systems; Eric Zelikman and Yuchen He, two former xAI researchers who helped develop the Grok chatbot; and Noah Goodman, a Stanford professor of psychology and computer science.
Humans&’s 20-odd employees also come from OpenAI, Meta, Reflection,…
