It's not often that you hear about seed rounds exceeding $10 million. H is a Paris-based startup formerly known as Holistic AI, where he announced a $220 million seed round just a few months after founding it.
The reason the company was able to raise so much money in such a short period of time is because it is an AI startup working on a new model with a great founding team. The startup's co-founder and CEO, Charles Cantor, was a researcher at Stanford University.
The other four co-founders all previously worked at Google-owned AI company DeepMind.
Karl Tuyls is Director of Research at DeepMind, where he worked on game theory and multi-agent research. Laurent Chiffret was a lead scientist who contributed to many of DeepMind's flagship projects, including AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and AlphaStar. He also recently worked on Google's Gemini and Gemma AI models. Daan Wierstra, who will become Company H's chief scientist, was a founding member of DeepMind. And finally, Julien Perolat also worked on game theory and multi-agent research in his DeepMind.
As you might expect, H will be working on AI agents, automated systems that can perform tasks traditionally performed by humans. The company's minimalist site states that H is working on a “frontier action model for increasing worker productivity.”
Investors in the startup include a long list of billionaires (or their family offices). Some famous VC funds. and several strategic supporters. The list of billionaires includes such notables as Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, Yuri Milner, Bernard Arnault (via Agraé Ventures), and Motier Ventures (the family office of the owners of the Galeries Lafayette Group). Contains name.
The VC list includes Accel, Bpifrance's large venture fund, Creandum, Elaia Partners, Eurazeo, FirstMark Capital and Visionaries Club as investors.
Finally, there are a few industrial investors, such as Amazon and Samsung. Interestingly, UiPath is also an investor in his company H. The European robotic process automation unicorn plans to support his H company with commercialization and partnerships.
Investors are splitting their commitments between equity and convertible debt, Bloomberg previously reported. Approximately 40% of the seed financing was traditional equity investment, meaning Company H sold a portion of its stock in exchange for cash.
The remainder will be converted into equity at a later stage when H raises funds. The investor's contribution to this debt component is determined based on the company's future valuation.
The H founding team has already assembled a team of 25 engineers and scientists, indicating the startup plans to move quickly. By comparison, Mistral AI, another well-funded AI company, is much more conservative when it comes to hiring.
H also needs to raise large amounts of capital to pay for computing power and datasets. The company says it aims to achieve full artificial general intelligence (AGI), a concept in which AI can perform a wide range of tasks at a level comparable to human intelligence. But let's be honest, this is a marketing promise because no one knows when or if AGI will happen.
As TechCrunch reported last year, Paris has become a magnet for AI startups and talent. Mistral AI is arguably the biggest name in town, but there are dozens of tech founders who have decided to set up shop in the French capital with a focus on artificial intelligence.
In addition to access to capital, tech giants like Facebook and Google have historically established AI research labs in Paris and London. The biggest AI startups, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, are based in San Francisco, but ecosystems for building AI companies are also emerging in Paris and London.