What humans& does

humans& (legal entity humans& ai, inc.) is a San Francisco-based, privately held frontier AI lab founded in September 2025 by alumni of xAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Meta, Reflection, AI2, Stanford, and MIT. Co-founders include Georges Harik (Google's seventh employee), Andi Peng (former Anthropic researcher), Noah Goodman, and Eric Zelikman (co-founder and CEO). The company's stated thesis is that the next chapter of AI should center on people and their relationships, positioning its systems as "connective tissue" that strengthens organizations and communities rather than tools that displace workers.

The company is building foundation models trained with long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory systems, and user-understanding components, targeting social intelligence, team coordination, group decision-making, conflict resolution, and organizational alignment rather than retrieval or code generation. Its announced flagship product, AICE Agent, is designed to plan, act, and follow through on extended multi-step coordination tasks across organizations. The product has not yet shipped; first commercial release is targeted for later in 2026.

humans& is pre-revenue. There are no disclosed customers, no public pricing, and no active commercial distribution channels. The January 2026 $480M seed round at a $4.48B post-money valuation, led by SV Angel and co-founder Georges Harik with participation from NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, GV, Emerson Collective, Forerunner, S32, DCVC, Human Capital, Liquid 2, Felicis, CRV, and others, is earmarked primarily for compute resources to train foundation models. The intended go-to-market is enterprise-focused, with plans to compete against Anthropic's Claude Cowork, Google Gemini in Workspace, and OpenAI multi-agent orchestration through direct sales and/or API access upon launch.

Name

humans&

Legal name

humans& ai, inc.

Website

https://humansand.ai

Company type

Private

Founded year

2025

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

11–50 employees

Short description

humans& is a San Francisco-based frontier AI lab building foundation models for social coordination and team collaboration, targeting enterprise organizations with long-horizon, multi-agent reinforcement learning systems such as its announced AICE Agent.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

AI Collaboration Software

NAICS

Custom Computer Programming Services (541511)

SIC

Services-Prepackaged Software (7372), Services-Computer Integrated Systems Design (7373)

akta.pro primary industry

Agents & Autonomous Workflows (Tool Use, Planning, Multi-Agent) (HDAAACAF)

akta.pro secondary industries

End-to-End Enterprise AI Platforms (MLOps & Model Lifecycle Management) (HDAEANAA), Workplace Automation & Self-Service (RPA for IT, Chatbots, Virtual Agents) (BPAEAIAI)

Keywords

• Frontier AI research
• Human-centered AI
• Multi-agent collaboration
• Foundation models
• Team coordination AI

Headquarters

HQ city

Redwood City

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Technology or R&D, Personnel, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales, Operations

Revenue model

1. AI Collaboration Platform (planned): The company is building a foundation model for social intelligence and team coordination. As a pre-revenue company with no shipped product as of early 2026, the revenue model has not been publicly disclosed. Planned product launch is targeted for 2026.

Go-to-market motion1 record

Marketing channels2 records

Core offering

humans& is a frontier AI lab developing foundation models for social intelligence and team collaboration. Its announced flagship product, AICE Agent, is an AI system that augments human workers by managing collaborative workflows—tracking decisions, balancing competing priorities, and maintaining alignment across organizations—trained using long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning. As of January 2026, the company is pre-revenue with approximately 20 employees and has not yet shipped its first commercial product; launch is planned for later in 2026.

Product overview

humans& is a human-centric frontier AI lab developing foundation models for social intelligence and team collaboration. The company is building AICE Agent, an AI system that augments rather than replaces human workers, using innovations in long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory, and user understanding. The product is designed to facilitate group decision-making, conflict resolution, and organizational alignment. As of early 2026, the company is pre-product launch with approximately 20 employees and has not yet shipped its first commercial product.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• AICE Agent An AI agent system designed to augment rather than replace human workers by managing collaborative workflows—tracking decisions, balancing competing priorities, and keeping teams aligned over time across organizations. Built on foundation models trained using long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning for social intelligence.

Segments1 record

Ideal customer profiles1 record

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

AI capability5 records

Feature3 records

Partnerships

Three partnerships are on record, tiered core and minor.

• Andi Peng (co-founder)coreOthers · 25 February 2026Co-founded humans& with expertise from Anthropic. Former Anthropic researcher focused on human-centric AI systems.
• Georges Harik (co-founder)coreOthers · 25 February 2026Co-founder of humans& and Google's seventh employee. Co-led the $480M seed round and is a key figure in the company's direction.
• Outshift by CiscominorStrategic or Co-development Partner · 9 February 2026Represented by Vijoy Pandey at VentureBeat's AI Impact Series, discussing agent connectivity and collective intelligence alongside humans& co-founder Noah Goodman. Both companies are exploring multi-agent AI architectures, with Outshift proposing an 'Internet of Cognition' framework.

Scale indicators4 records

Recent moves5 records

Expansion highlights5 records

Broad incumbents

• Google DeepMind: Alphabet's frontier AI research arm and named competitor via Gemini in Workspace. DeepMind shares talent lineage with humans& (multiple co-founders have prior DeepMind experience) and pursues overlapping multi-agent and reasoning research.
• Anthropic: Frontier AI lab and direct competitor in the AI agent / coordination space (Claude Cowork). Humans& co-founder Andi Peng is an Anthropic alumnus, and Anthropic is explicitly named as a competitor humans& plans to challenge in enterprise collaboration.
• Inflection AI: Enterprise-focused AI lab founded by Mustafa Suleyman (DeepMind co-founder) pursuing human-centric personal and enterprise AI assistants. Comparable positioning around 'human-centered AI' and overlap with humans& in DeepMind talent lineage.
• OpenAI: Frontier AI lab building foundation models and multi-agent orchestration capabilities (e.g., Operator, AgentKit). Humans& explicitly positions against OpenAI's multi-agent efforts and competes for the same enterprise AI talent pool.
• Cohere: Enterprise-focused foundation model provider offering AI agents and workflow automation for businesses. Comparable as a competing enterprise AI platform pursuing agentic capabilities and targeting similar organizational coordination use cases.

Emerging players

• Sierra AI: Bret Taylor-led AI agent company focused on conversational agents for enterprise customer experience. Comparable in building production-grade AI agents for enterprise workflows and in pursuing a 'human-centric' augmentation rather than replacement positioning.
• MultiOn: AI agent startup building autonomous task-execution agents for consumers and enterprises. Comparable to humans& in pursuing agentic AI capabilities, though MultiOn focuses on individual user task automation rather than multi-agent team coordination.
• Adept AI: Early-stage AI agent company building foundation models that take actions on behalf of users across enterprise software. Comparable to humans& in its focus on agents that augment rather than replace workers, though Adept focuses on individual task automation versus multi-agent coordination.
• Cognition AI: AI lab behind Devin, the autonomous software engineering agent. Comparable in building foundation-model-driven autonomous agents for enterprise workflows and in pursuing capital-intensive frontier model development with significant seed-stage funding.

Direct peers

• xAI: Elon Musk's frontier AI lab with overlapping talent lineage (humans& founders include ex-xAI researchers) and similar foundation-model ambitions. Both labs target reasoning and agentic capabilities and compete directly for AI research talent.

Market position

Strengths4 records

Weaknesses4 records

Competitive moat4 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights6 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/humansand
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/humansand

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles4 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds1 record

Investors16 records

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about humans&