French AI startup H raises $220 million seed round

It’s not often that you hear about a seed round above $10 million. H, a startup based in Paris and previously known as Holistic AI, has announced a $220 million seed round just a few months after the company’s inception.

The reason why this company managed to raise so much money so quickly is that it’s an AI startup working on new models with an impressive founding team. Charles Kantor, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, was a university researcher at Stanford.

The four other co-founders all previously worked for DeepMind, the AI company owned by Google. Karl Tuyls was a research director at DeepMind, where he worked on game theory and multi-agent research.

Laurent Sifre was a principal scientist 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 models.

Daan Wierstra was a founding member at DeepMind and will become the Chief Scientist Officer at H. And finally, Julien Perolat also worked quite a bit on game theory and multi-agent research at DeepMind.

As you may have guessed, H is going to work on AI agents, automated systems that can perform tasks that are traditionally performed by human workers. The company’s minimalistic site says that H is working on “frontier action models to boost the productivity of workers.”

The list of investors include a long list of billionaires (or their family offices), some well-known VC funds and a few strategic backers. On the billionaire list, you’ll find 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).

On the VC list, some of the 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, such as Amazon and Samsung. Interestingly, UiPath is also an investor in H. The European robotic process automation unicorn will also help H when it comes to commercialization and partnerships.

According to an earlier Bloomberg report, investors are splitting their commitments into equity and convertible debt. Around 40% of today’s financing is a traditional equity investment, meaning that H has sold a portion of its shares in exchanges for money.

The rest will be converted to equity at a later stage, when H raises another round of funding. The investors’ stakes for this debt part will be based on the future valuation of the company — there are sometimes a valuation cap and a discount rate.

The H founding team has already put together a team of 25 engineers and scientists, which means that the company plans to move quickly. Comparatively, Mistral AI, another well-funded AI company, has been much more conservative when it comes to hiring.

H also needs to raise a lot of money as some of this cash will be used to pay for compute and data power. The company says that it wants to reach full Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). But let’s be honest, that’s a marketing promise as nobody knows if or when AGI is going to happen.

As TechCrunch wrote last year, Paris has become a magnet for AI startups and talent. Mistral AI is arguably the biggest name in town, but there are dozens of tech founders who decided to focus on artificial intelligence and set up shop in the French city.

In addition to access to capital, tech giants — such as Facebook and Google — have historically set up AI research labs in Paris and London. While the biggest AI companies — such as OpenAI and Anthropic — are based in San Francisco, AI startup ecosystems are also emerging in Paris and London.