Ex-Deepmind employees raise $220M for "AGI" model

“H”, a global foundation model and “agentic” AI company, has thrown its hat in the ring as a challenger in the race towards “AGI” with a $220M Seed raise.

Representatives from the company said that the capital will be used to further develop its research talent and to acquire “vast amounts of compute and data power”. Backers included Accel, UiPath Inc., Bpifrance, Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, Amazon, FirstMark, Elaia Partners, Eurazeo and Yuri Milner. Other participants in the round include Bernard Arnault’s Aglaé Ventures, Creandum, Motier Ventures, Samsung and Visionaries Club.

Four of H’s founding team members were previously at Deepmind, with CEO and Charles Kantor hailing from Stanford, and the team comprises 25 AI engineers and scientists.

“I’m incredibly fortunate to be on this journey alongside such talented co-founders, supportive investors, and our industry partners” said Kantor. “The H Company is building AI that is not only at the frontier, but also Holistic and Humane. The team unites around a simple yet ambitious mission: to drive the productivity of billions forward. We’re committed to transforming entire industries as well as the everyday human experience, bringing that human-computer tandem into reality and paving the way towards full-AGI.”

“The H team’s vision of creating a large action model to automate business tasks has the ability to be transformational across all industries,” said Philippe Botteri, Partner at Accel. “What H is building goes beyond the capabilities of LLMs and we’re thrilled to be backing such an exceptional founding team on their journey. We look forward to supporting the H team.”

 "Bpifrance is delighted to support a top-tier scientific team trained in the best French institutions, bringing along highly qualified profiles. By launching in Paris, H confirms France’s leadership in the field of Generative AI. We are thrilled to participate in these exciting advancements through our investment and look forward to assisting these ambitious entrepreneurs at every stage of their journey with the full extent of Bpifrance’s resources,” added Nicolas Dufourcq, CEO of Bpifrance.

“I believe there is tremendous opportunity with H, a company founded by some of the world’s top AI experts who uniquely understand the capabilities required to deliver impactful and evolutionary AI solutions,” said Daniel Dines, Executive Chairman and Chief Innovation Officer at UiPath, Inc. “The H team will bring the power of GenAI to businesses and business automation via a new generation of action models, capable of completing a succession of tasks to automate complex workflows. I believe this foundational layer will be transformative and give new execution capabilities to software across industries and functions, with the ultimate goal to reach artificial general intelligence for business automation.”