It’s rarely that you simply hear a couple of seed round above $10 million. H, a startup based in Paris and previously often called Holistic AI, has announced a $220 million seed round just a number of months after the corporate’s inception.
It has managed to lift a lot money so quickly since it’s an AI startup working on recent models with a formidable founding team. Charles Kantor, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, was a university researcher at Stanford.
The 4 other co-founders all previously worked for DeepMind, the AI company owned by Google: Karl Tuyls was a research director at DeepMind, where he worked on game theory and multi-agent research. Laurent Sifre was a principal scientist who contributed to lots of DeepMind’s flagship projects, corresponding to AlphaGo, AlphaFold and AlphaStar. More recently, he also worked on Google’s Gemini and Gemma AI models. Daan Wierstra, who will turn into H’s chief scientist, was a founding member at DeepMind. And, finally, Julien Perolat worked on game theory and multi-agent research at DeepMind.
As you’ll have guessed, H goes to work on AI agents: automated systems that may perform tasks which can be traditionally performed by human staff. The corporate’s minimalistic site states that H is working on “frontier motion models to spice up the productivity of staff.”
Investors within the startup include an extended list of billionaires (or their family offices); some well-known VC funds; and a number of strategic backers. On the billionaire list you’ll find notable names like Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, Yuri Milner, Bernard Arnault (via Aglaé Ventures) and Motier Ventures (the family office of the owners of the Galeries Lafayette Group).
On the VC list, investors include Accel, Bpifrance’s Large Enterprise fund, Creandum, Elaia Partners, Eurazeo, FirstMark Capital and Visionaries Club.
Finally, there are a handful of business investors, including Amazon and Samsung. Interestingly, UiPath can also be an investor in H. The European robotic process automation unicorn will help H in terms of commercialization and partnerships.
Based on an earlier Bloomberg report, investors are splitting their commitments into equity and convertible debt. Around 40% of the seed financing is a conventional equity investment, meaning H has sold a portion of its shares in exchange for money.
The remaining might be converted to equity at a later stage, when H raises one other round of funding. The investors’ stakes for this debt part might be based on the long run valuation of the corporate.
The H founding team has already put together a gaggle of 25 engineers and scientists, which indicates the startup plans to maneuver quickly. Comparatively, Mistral AI, one other well-funded AI company, has been far more conservative in terms of hiring.
H also needs to lift quite a lot of money to pay for compute power and datasets. The corporate says it wants to succeed in full artificial general intelligence (AGI), an idea where AI is capable across a wide selection of tasks at a level that’s comparable with human intelligence. But let’s be honest, that’s a marketing promise since no one knows if or when AGI will occur.
As TechCrunch reported last yr, Paris has turn into a magnet for AI startups and talent. Mistral AI is arguably the most important name on the town, but there are dozens of tech founders who’ve decided to deal with artificial intelligence and arrange shop within the French capital.
Along with access to funding, tech giants — including the likes of Facebook and Google — have historically arrange AI research labs in Paris and London. While the most important AI startups, corresponding to OpenAI and Anthropic, are based in San Francisco, AI company-building ecosystems are also emerging in Paris and London.
