A new AI startup is betting the next frontier isn't smarter chatbots - it's getting people to actually work together. Humans&, founded by alumni from Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind, just raised a $480 million seed round to build what it calls a "central nervous system" for human-AI collaboration. The three-month-old company doesn't have a product yet, but it's already making waves with a bold premise: that AI needs to be redesigned from scratch for social intelligence, not just question-answering.
AI chatbots keep getting smarter at answering your questions, but they're still terrible at helping groups of people make decisions together. Humans& thinks that's the real problem worth solving.
The startup just closed a $480 million seed round - one of the largest in AI history - to build what CEO Eric Zelikman calls the "connective tissue" for organizations. The pitch is straightforward: today's AI models are designed for one person at a time, optimized to give you the answer you want. But real work happens in messy, multiplayer contexts where people have competing priorities, long-running projects, and the need to stay aligned over weeks or months.
"It feels like we're ending the first paradigm of scaling, where question-answering models were trained to be very smart at particular verticals," Andi Peng, co-founder and former Anthropic employee, told TechCrunch. "Now we're entering what we believe to be the second wave of adoption where the average consumer or user is trying to figure out what to do with all these things."
The company doesn't have a product yet. It's only three months old. But the founding team's pedigree - alumni from , , , xAI, and DeepMind - was enough to command a valuation that rivals some late-stage startups. The bet investors are making is that Humans& can crack a problem the AI giants haven't prioritized: building models trained specifically for coordination, not completion.
