AI chatbots can answer questions and summarize documents, but they're still designed for one user at a time. Now a new startup called Humans& is betting that coordination, not conversation, is the next major frontier for artificial intelligence. Founded by alumni from Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind, the three-month-old company just raised a $480 million seed round to build foundation models designed for social intelligence and multi-user collaboration - not just information retrieval.
Humans& just became one of the most well-funded AI startups you've never heard of. The three-month-old company pulled in a staggering $480 million seed round this week, and it doesn't even have a product yet. What it does have is a star-studded founding team from Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind - and a bold thesis that the entire AI industry is about to pivot from chatbots to coordination systems.
"It feels like we're ending the first paradigm of scaling, where question-answering models were trained to be very smart at particular verticals, and now we're entering what we believe to be the second wave of adoption," Andi Peng, co-founder and former Anthropic employee, told TechCrunch. The average user is trying to figure out what to do with all these AI tools, she said, and that's where Humans& comes in.
The pitch is simple but ambitious: current AI models are optimized for single-user tasks like answering questions or generating code. They're not built to handle the messier, more valuable work of coordinating teams, tracking decisions across time, or balancing competing priorities among multiple stakeholders. Humans& wants to build a "central nervous system" for organizations - a foundation model trained specifically for social intelligence and group collaboration.
CEO Eric Zelikman, a former xAI researcher, pointed to something as mundane as choosing a company logo to illustrate the problem. "When you have to make a large group decision, often it comes down to someone taking everyone into one room, getting everyone to express their different camps," he told TechCrunch, laughing as his team recalled the tedious process of getting everyone aligned on their own branding.
