It’s not often you hear about a funding round exceeding $10 million. H, a Paris-based startup formerly known as Holistic AI, announced a $220 million funding round just months after founding the company.
It was able to raise so much money so quickly because it is an AI startup working on new models with an impressive founding team. Charles Kantor, co-founder and CEO of the startup, was a research fellow at Stanford.
The other four co-founders all previously worked for DeepMind, the Google-owned AI company: Karl Tuyls was research director at DeepMind, where he worked on game theory and multi-agent search. Laurent Sifre was one of the key scientists 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 AI models. Daan Wierstra, who would become H’s chief scientist, was one of the founding members of DeepMind. Finally, Julien Perolat worked on game theory and multi-agent search at DeepMind.
As you might have guessed, H will be working on AI agents: automated systems capable of performing tasks traditionally done by human workers. The company’s minimalist site says H works on “pioneering action models to increase worker productivity.”
Investors in the startup include a long list of billionaires (or their family offices); some well-known venture capital funds; and some strategic donors. On the list of billionaires, we find notable names like Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, Yuri Milner, Bernard Arnault (via Aglaé Ventures) and Motier Ventures (the family office of the owners of the Galeries Lafayette group).
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, including Amazon and Samsung. Interestingly, UiPath is also an investor in H. The European robotic process automation unicorn will help H with marketing and partnerships.
According to a previous Bloomberg report, investors divide their commitments between equities and convertible debt. About 40% of the seed funding is a traditional equity investment, meaning H sold a portion of his shares in exchange for cash.
The remainder will be converted into equity later when H raises another round of financing. Investors’ stakes for this debt part will depend on the future valuation of the company.
H’s founding team has already assembled a group of 25 engineers and scientists, indicating that the startup plans to move forward quickly. In comparison, Mistral AI, another well-funded AI company, has been much more conservative when it comes to hiring.
H also has to raise a lot of money to pay for computing power and data sets. The company says it wants to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), a concept in which AI is capable of performing a wide range of tasks at a level comparable to human intelligence. But let’s be honest, it’s a marketing promise since no one knows if and when AGI will happen.
As TechCrunch reported last year, Paris has become a magnet for startups and AI talent. Mistral AI is arguably the biggest name in town, but dozens of tech industry founders have decided to focus on artificial intelligence and set up shop in the French capital.
In addition to access to funding, tech giants – notably Facebook and Google – have historically established AI research labs in Paris and London. While the largest AI startups, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, are based in San Francisco, AI business-building ecosystems are also emerging in Paris and London.
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