AI chatbots are getting better at answering questions, summarizing documents, and solving mathematical equations, but they still largely behave like helpful assistants for one user at a time. They’re not designed to manage the messier work of real collaboration: coordinating people with competing priorities, tracking long-running decisions, and keeping teams aligned over time.
Humans&, a new startup founded by alumni of Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind, thinks closing that gap is the next major frontier for foundation models. The company this week raised a $480 million seed round to build a “central nervous system” for the human-plus-AI economy. The startup’s “AI for empowering humans” framing has dominated early coverage, but the company’s actual ambition is more novel: building a new foundation model architecture designed for social intelligence, not just information retrieval or code generation.
“It feels like we’re ending the first paradigm of scaling, where question-answering models were trained to be very smart at particular verticals, and now we’re entering what we believe to be the second wave of adoption where the average consumer or user is trying to figure out what to do with all these things,” Andi Peng, one of Humans&’s co-founders and a former Anthropic employee, told TechCrunch.
Humans&’s pitch centers on helping usher people into the new era of AI, moving beyond the narrative that AI will take their jobs. Whether or not that’s just marketing speak, the timing is critical: Companies are transitioning from chat to agents. Models are competent, but workflows aren’t, and the coordination challenge remains largely unaddressed. And through it all, people feel threatened and overwhelmed by AI.
The three-month-old company, like several of its peers, has managed to raise its startling seed round off the back of this philosophy and the pedigree of its founding team. Humans& still doesn’t have a product, nor has it been clear about what exactly it might be, though the team said it could be a replacement for multiplayer or multi-user contexts like communication platforms (think Slack) or collaboration platforms (think Google Docs and Notion). As for use cases and target audience, the team hinted at both enterprise and consumer applications.
“We are building a product and a model that is centered on communication and collaboration,” Eric Zelikman, co-founder and CEO of Humans& and former xAI researcher, told TechCrunch, adding that the focus is on getting the product to help people work together and communicate more effectively — both with each other and with AI tools.
“Like when you have to make a large group decision, often it comes down to someone taking everyone into one room, getting everyone to express their different camps about, for example, what kind of logo they’d like,” Zelikman continued, chortling with his team as they recalled the time-consuming tedium of getting everyone to agree on a logo for the startup.
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Zelikman added that the new model will be trained to ask questions in a way that feels like interacting with a friend or a colleague, someone who is trying to get to know you. Chatbots today are programmed to ask questions constantly, but they do so without understanding the value of the question. He says this is because they’ve been optimized for two things: How much a user immediately likes a response they’re given, and how likely the model is to answer the question it receives correctly.
Part of the lack of clarity around what the product is could be that Humans& doesn’t exactly have an answer for that yet. Peng said Humans& is designing the product in conjunction with the model.
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