H, a French startup created at the end of 2023, has just raised $220 million to develop a French Artificial Intelligence dedicated, in particular, to improving productivity in the workplace. Investors include Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, Bernard Arnaud, Amazon, Eurazeo, BPI, etc.

There was Mistral AI, there is now also “H”. The startup, which was launched at the end of 2023 under the name Holistic AI, just renamed “H” on the occasion of new statutes filed in April 2024, was created in Paris by, in particular, a young student fresh out of Harvard and Stanford, and several ex-Google employees. It took advantage of the opening of Vivatech to announce an unprecedented seed fundraising in France. No less than 220 million dollars with which, It aims to develop a general AI dedicated in particular to improving productivity at work, thanks to the “automation of tasks and decision-making”.  

Among the announced investors who believe in this project, none other than: 

UiPath Inc., Bpifrance, via its Large Venture fund, Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, FirstMark, Elaia Partners, Eurazeo, Yuri Milner, Amazon, Aglaé Ventures – by Bernard Arnault, Creandum, Motier Ventures, Samsung, and Visionaries Club, or Samsung

An announcement and an impressive fundraising that President Emmanuel Macron immediately welcomed on May 21, calling on investors to " A revival of European funding for these technologies " before announcing that France will organize a world summit on this subject in February 2025.

It should be noted that Mistral AI, another French AI gem, had raised "only" $105 million in seed funding at its beginnings, before successfully raising an unprecedented $385 million 6 months later. With 220 million in seed funding, the case of H demonstrates that investors clearly believe in the potential of French unicorns in the field of AI. From there to thinking that France is on its way to being one of the 5 countries that will count the most tomorrow in Artificial Intelligence, there is only one – small – step.

The founding team, the one that convinced investors of the viability of its project, is not new to AI:

In addition to its CEO, we find there: Charles Kantor, several big names, some of whom have recently left DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google, for this promising adventure. Like the French Laurent Sifre, known for his contribution to the Google Alpha GO and Gemini programs. Other French people who have already worked for Google: Julien Perolat, researcher, expert in game theory and learning. Other talents who have worked at DeepMind: Karl Tuyls, who notably invented AlphaRank and co-directed work on Stratego (DeepNash) and TacticAI (Sports AI), or Daan Wiestra, known for his research on reinforcement learning and recurrent neural networks… He is also the co-inventor of deep Q-nets and deepRL, as well as the co-inventor of VAE, the first high-performance deep generative models. Not exactly beginners, then.

An approach to H-olistic and H-uman Artificial Intelligence:

With a team of 25 AI engineers and researchers, “H” is on a mission to “bring the power of Generative AI (GenAI) to businesses around the world through a new generation of multimodal, action-focused models. It can clearly count on its crack team, from leading companies, university laboratories and scale-ups, and has unique expertise not only in LLM scaling, but also in reinforcement and multi-agent learning, computer vision, retrieval, memory, generative models, reasoning, and cloud and SaaS,” the group of investors details. Just that.

"With H, explains Charles Kantor, its CEO, we are establishing an approach to Artificial Intelligence that is not only state-of-the-art, but also H-olistic and H-uman.

The team is united around a mission that is as simple as it is ambitious: to advance the productivity of billions of people. “We are determined to transform entire industries and our daily experiences, making the human-computer tandem a reality, and paving the way for a more general and more complete Intelligence.”

"By launching in Paris, "H" confirms France's leadership in the field of generative AI. We are very proud to participate in these exciting advances and eager to support these ambitious entrepreneurs at each stage of their project, with all of Bpifrance's resources." emphasizes Nicolas Dufourcq, General Manager of Bpifrance.