humans&

Humans& was founded in approximately October 2025 by Eric Zelikman (CEO), Andi Peng, Georges Harik, Yuchen He and Noah Goodman. The founding team was drawn from Anthropic, xAI, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Meta, Stanford and MIT, and the company describes itself as a "human-centric frontier AI lab" whose goal is to build AI that acts as connective tissue between people, rather than a replacement for them — with an early focus on collaboration, messaging, memory and long-horizon multi-agent reinforcement learning.

The company emerged from stealth on January 20, 2026, when it announced a $480 million seed round at a $4.48 billion post-money valuation, with roughly 20 employees at the time. The round was led by SV Angel's Ron Conway together with co-founder Georges Harik, and drew participation from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, GV (Alphabet's venture arm), Emerson Collective, Forerunner, S32, DCVC, Human Capital, Felicis and CRV, among other individual and institutional backers. Humans& has said it plans to direct most of the capital toward compute for training its own models, and expects to launch its first product — described as an AI-enhanced tool for collaboration and messaging — in early 2026.

Reporting from Forbes on October 31, 2025 — roughly three months before the round closed — described Zelikman as being in talks to raise as much as $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation; the seed round that actually closed in January 2026 came in smaller, at $480 million and a $4.48 billion valuation, and no larger financing has been confirmed as closed since.