Humans&, a new company founded by top researchers from Google, Anthropic, xAI, OpenAI and Meta, among others, announced Tuesday that it has raised a massive $480 million seed round at a staggering $4.48 billion valuation.
So far, not much is known about the company, founded in September 2025, which says its mission is to design an AI tool “around how people connect and work together, where collaboration and human insight remain central.”
The co-founders are former Anthropic researcher Andi Peng, xAI researcher Eric Zelikman, early Google employee Georges Harik, Yuchen He and Noah Goodman.
SV Angel 1 and co-founder Harik also led the round, which included participation from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, GV (Google Ventures), Emerson Collective, Forerunner, S32, DCVC, Human Capital, Felicis 2 and CRV, among “many others,” according to the company. The seed round was raised all cash unstructured.
The startup says its AI lab aims to set “the standard for how AI supports human connection.” Its tool, it adds, will act as a connective tissue to facilitate collaboration between people and intelligent systems.
In a blog post, the company 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.”
Peng told Crunchbase News via email that humans& will spend the majority of the capital on compute for training models.
Huge seed rounds for AI
While huge funding rounds are not unusual in the artificial intelligence space, the Humans& raise is believed to be one of the largest seed rounds ever raised. The largest, however, was raised by Thinking Machines Lab last year. Launched and led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, and joined by AI heavy hitters from Meta, OpenAI, Google and Mistral AI, the San Francisco-based company last year announced a $2 billion Andreessen Horowitz-led financing at a $10 billion valuation. It was by far the largest seed round in the Crunchbase dataset.
Crunchbase data showed that seed investors poured money into AI startups in 2025 at an even more exuberant pace than in 2024, which was already record-setting. More than 41% of the $38.4 billion invested in global seed funding in 2025 went to companies in AI-focused industry categories, per Crunchbase data. That was up from 30% in 2024.
The numbers also got bigger. Just over $15 billion had gone to AI-focused seed rounds as of Dec. 12, per Crunchbase, up about 50% from 2024. Below, we take a look at AI investment total and share for the past six years.
It was also a record-setting year for really, really huge seed rounds. By this, we mean financings of $100 million or more — once unheard of, but now not that uncommon.
We kept the dataset of these deals to U.S. startups for simpler vetting. But even with this limit, the total was enormous — topping $3.6 billion in 2025, as of Dec. 12, a new record.
Related Crunchbase query:
Related reading:
Illustration: Dom Guzman
Stay up to date with recent funding rounds, acquisitions, and more with the
Crunchbase Daily.
