Humans&, a newly launched AI startup founded by former employees of Anthropic, xAI, and Google, has raised $480 million in a seed funding round at a $4.48 billion valuation, according to The New York Times. The round includes major investors such as Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and prominent venture capital firms including SV Angel, Google Ventures, and Emerson Collective, the investment arm of Laurene Powell Jobs. The company, just three months old, is part of a growing trend of investors pouring capital into startups founded by engineers and researchers who have left major AI labs. Humans&’s mission centers on building AI systems that enhance human collaboration rather than replace human roles. The company describes itself as “human-centric,” aiming to create tools that act as a digital connective tissue within organizations and communities. The founding team includes Andi Peng, a former Anthropic researcher who contributed to the development of Claude 3.5 through Claude 4.5, focusing on reinforcement learning and post-training techniques. Georges Harik, Google’s seventh employee and a key architect of its early advertising systems, is also a co-founder. Eric Zelikman and Yuchen He, both former researchers at xAI who helped develop the Grok chatbot, are part of the leadership. Noah Goodman, a professor of psychology and computer science at Stanford, rounds out the core team. The startup’s small team of about 20 employees comes from leading institutions including OpenAI, Meta, Reflection, AI2, and MIT. Humans& is building software that enables people to work more effectively with each other and with AI—conceptually similar to an AI-powered instant messaging platform. A key goal is to train AI models to proactively request information from users, retain it over time, and use it to improve interactions across sessions. The company is focused on advancing foundational AI capabilities such as long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, persistent memory systems, and deeper user understanding. It emphasizes a tightly integrated approach to both scientific research and product development, aiming to bridge the gap between theoretical innovation and real-world usability. Humans&’s vision is to reshape how people interact with AI, ensuring that systems evolve not just to be smarter, but to be more collaborative and context-aware. The company has not yet provided further details on its product roadmap, and TechCrunch has reached out for additional comment.