A three-month-old startup, Humans&, has raised a $480 million seed round to build a foundation model optimized for coordination and collaboration, not just question-answering. Founded by alumni of Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI and Google DeepMind, the company says it will pair a new model with a product layer aimed at serving as the “connective tissue” across teams, potentially displacing existing tools like Slack and Notion. The system will train on long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning to sustain decisions over time and navigate multi-user dynamics, the founders said. The ambition pits Humans& against tech giants embedding AI into workplace suites, raising capital and compute hurdles as well as competitive pressure from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. The company has no product yet but rejects acquisition overtures, arguing that a model built for social intelligence could redefine how people and AI collaborate.
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