French AI startup H raises $220M seed round

It’s not usually that you just hear a couple of seed spherical above $10 million. H, a startup primarily based in Paris and beforehand referred to as Holistic AI, has introduced a $220 million seed spherical only a few months after the corporate’s inception.

It has managed to lift a lot cash so rapidly as a result of it’s an AI startup engaged on new fashions with a powerful founding staff. Charles Kantor, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, was a college researcher at Stanford.

The 4 different co-founders all beforehand labored for DeepMind, the AI firm owned by Google: Karl Tuyls was a analysis director at DeepMind, the place he labored on sport concept and multi-agent analysis. Laurent Sifre was a principal scientist who contributed to a lot of DeepMind’s flagship initiatives, reminiscent of AlphaGo, AlphaFold and AlphaStar. Extra lately, he additionally labored on Google’s Gemini and Gemma AI fashions. Daan Wierstra, who will develop into H’s chief scientist, was a founding member at DeepMind. And, lastly, Julien Perolat labored on sport concept and multi-agent analysis at DeepMind.

As you could have guessed, H goes to work on AI brokers: automated techniques that may carry out duties which can be historically carried out by human staff. The corporate’s minimalistic website states that H is engaged on “frontier motion fashions to spice up the productiveness of staff.”

Traders within the startup embody a protracted checklist of billionaires (or their household workplaces); some well-known VC funds; and some strategic backers. On the billionaire checklist you’ll discover notable names like Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, Yuri Milner, Bernard Arnault (by way of Aglaé Ventures) and Motier Ventures (the household workplace of the house owners of the Galeries Lafayette Group).

On the VC checklist, buyers embody Accel, Bpifrance’s Massive Enterprise fund, Creandum, Elaia Companions, Eurazeo, FirstMark Capital and Visionaries Membership.

Lastly, there are a handful of commercial buyers, together with Amazon and Samsung. Apparently, UiPath can also be an investor in H. The European robotic course of automation unicorn will assist H in terms of commercialization and partnerships.

In response to an earlier Bloomberg report, buyers are splitting their commitments into fairness and convertible debt. Round 40% of the seed financing is a conventional fairness funding, which means H has bought a portion of its shares in change for cash.

The remaining will likely be transformed to fairness at a later stage, when H raises one other spherical of funding. The buyers’ stakes for this debt half will likely be primarily based on the longer term valuation of the corporate.

The H founding staff has already put collectively a bunch of 25 engineers and scientists, which signifies the startup plans to maneuver rapidly. Comparatively, Mistral AI, one other well-funded AI firm, has been rather more conservative in terms of hiring.

H additionally wants to lift some huge cash to pay for compute energy and datasets. The corporate says it needs to achieve full synthetic basic intelligence (AGI), an idea the place AI is succesful throughout a variety of duties at a degree that’s comparable with human intelligence. However let’s be sincere, that’s a advertising and marketing promise since no one is aware of if or when AGI will occur.

As cryptonoiz reported final 12 months, Paris has develop into a magnet for AI startups and expertise. Mistral AI is arguably the largest identify on the town, however there are dozens of tech founders who’ve determined to deal with synthetic intelligence and arrange store within the French capital.

Along with entry to funding, tech giants — together with the likes of Fb and Google — have traditionally arrange AI analysis labs in Paris and London. Whereas the largest AI startups, reminiscent of OpenAI and Anthropic, are primarily based in San Francisco, AI company-building ecosystems are additionally rising in Paris and London.