A seed round of funding more than $10 million is uncommon, but H, a Paris-based firm that was previously known as Holistic AI, has raised an astounding $220 million very quickly after its founding.
The startup's prominent founding team and emphasis on creating new AI models have allowed it to draw in significant investment so rapidly. Charles Kantor, the co-founder and CEO of H and a former Stanford University researcher, is one of the team members. The other co-founders are all former employees of Google-owned DeepMind, an AI startup. These include former research director Karl Tuyls; principal scientist Laurent Sifre, who worked on important projects like AlphaGo and AlphaFold; founding member Daan Wierstra, who will be H's chief scientist; and game theory and multi-agent research specialist Julien Perolat.
H wants to create artificial intelligence (AI) agents that can replace human labor-intensive tasks, increasing worker productivity through the use of "frontier action models." The company has received financing from a variety of influential industrialists, venture capital firms, and billionaires. Xavier Niel, Yuri Milner, Bernard Arnault (via Aglaé Ventures), Eric Schmidt, and Motier Ventures are a few well-known investors. Accel, Bpifrance's Large Venture fund, Creandum, and other venture capital firms have contributed, along with major corporations like Amazon and Samsung. The robotic process automation unicorn UiPath has also made a contribution, and it will help H with collaborations and commercialization.
The money is divided between equity and convertible debt, with traditional equity accounting for roughly 40% of the total, according to a Bloomberg report. In a subsequent investment round, the remaining amount will be converted to equity based on the company's valuation at the time.
25 engineers and scientists have already joined the initial team, demonstrating H's desire to advance quickly. As part of its goal to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), a degree of AI capability equivalent to human intelligence across a wide range of tasks, the company also needs a sizable amount of funding for processing power and data sets.
According to TechCrunch, Paris is becoming a center for AI innovation, attracting talent and entrepreneurs in part because of its favorable funding climate and the existence of AI research facilities from well-known tech companies.