It's not often you hear about a seed round of more than $10 million. H, a Paris-based startup formerly known as Holistic ai, has announced a $220 million seed round just months after the company was created.
The reason this company managed to raise so much money in such a short time is that it is an artificial intelligence startup working on new models with an impressive founding team. Charles Kantor, co-founder and CEO of the startup, was an undergraduate researcher at Stanford.
The other four co-founders previously worked for DeepMind, the Google-owned artificial intelligence company. Karl Tuyls was director of research at DeepMind, where he worked on game theory and multi-agent research.
Laurent Sifre was a senior scientist who contributed to many of DeepMind's flagship projects, such as AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and AlphaStar. More recently, he also worked on Google's Gemini and Gemma models.
Daan Wierstra was a founding member of DeepMind and will become the scientific director of H. And finally, Julien Perolat also worked quite a bit on game theory and multi-agent research at DeepMind.
As you may have guessed, H will work on ai agents, automated systems that can perform tasks traditionally performed by human workers. From the company ai/”>minimalist site says H is working on “frontier action models to boost worker productivity.”
The list of investors includes a long list of billionaires (or their family offices), some well-known venture capital funds, and some strategic sponsors. On the list of billionaires are Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, Yuri Milner, Bernard Arnault (through 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 Venture fund, Creandum, Elaia Partners, Eurazeo, FirstMark Capital and Visionaries Club.
Finally, there are a handful of industrial investors, such as amazon and Samsung. Interestingly, UiPath is also an investor in H. The European robotic process automation unicorn will also help H when it comes to commercialization and partnerships.
ai-from-accel”>According to a previous Bloomberg report, investors are splitting their commitments into equity and convertible debt. About 40% of the current financing is traditional equity investment, meaning H has sold a portion of his shares in exchange for money.
The rest will be converted to equity at a later stage, when H raises another round of financing. Investors' bet on this part of the debt will be based on the future valuation of the company; Sometimes there is a valuation limit and a discount rate.
H's founding team has already assembled a team of 25 engineers and scientists, meaning the company plans to move forward quickly. Comparatively, Mistral ai, another well-funded ai company, has been much more conservative when it comes to hiring.
H also needs to raise a lot of money, as some of this cash will be used to pay for computing and data power. The company says it wants to achieve full Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). But let's be honest, that's a marketing promise, since no one knows if or when AGI will be produced.
As TechCrunch wrote last year, Paris has become a magnet for ai startups and talent. Mistral ai is arguably the biggest name in town, but there are dozens of tech founders who decided to focus on artificial intelligence and set up shop in the French city.
In addition to access to capital, tech giants such as facebook and Google have historically set up ai research labs in Paris and London. While the largest ai companies, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, are based in San Francisco, ai startup ecosystems are also emerging in Paris and London.
