Startup Raises $480M to Build AI for Team Collaboration

AI can write your emails and answer your questions, but it still can't help your team agree on a logo without hours of debate.

That's the problem Humans& wants to solve. The three-month-old startup just raised $480 million to build what they call a "central nervous system" for teams working with AI.

The company was founded by researchers from Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind. They noticed that while AI has gotten incredibly smart at answering individual questions, it fails at the messy reality of group work: tracking decisions over time, managing competing priorities, and keeping teams aligned.

"We're ending the first paradigm of scaling, where question-answering models were trained to be very smart at particular verticals," says co-founder Andi Peng, formerly of Anthropic. Now comes the second wave: figuring out what to do with all these smart tools.

Humans& isn't building another chatbot you can plug into Slack or Google Docs. They're creating an entirely new kind of AI model designed for social intelligence, not just information retrieval.

CEO Eric Zelikman explains it with a simple example: getting everyone to agree on a company logo. Today, someone has to wrangle everyone into a room and navigate different opinions manually. Humans& envisions AI that could facilitate that process naturally.

The company is designing both the AI model and the product interface together, evolving them side by side. The goal is AI that asks questions like a thoughtful colleague, not a chatbot mindlessly optimized for user satisfaction.

The Ripple Effect

The timing matters. Companies everywhere are moving from simple AI assistants to more complex AI agents, but the coordination piece is missing. Meanwhile, many workers feel threatened by AI rather than empowered by it.

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman recently argued that companies are implementing AI wrong by treating it as isolated tools. "AI lives at the workflow level," he wrote, "and the people closest to the work know where the friction actually is."

That's exactly where Humans& wants to operate. Other startups are noticing the same gap. AI note-taking app Granola just raised $43 million as it added collaborative features.

Humans& doesn't have a finished product yet, and they're still working out exactly what it will look like. They hint it could work for both businesses and everyday consumers, anywhere people need to communicate and make decisions together.

The company's pitch moves beyond the tired "AI will take your jobs" narrative. Instead, they're building for a future where AI helps humans coordinate with each other, not just complete individual tasks faster.

In a world where getting five people to agree on anything feels impossible, AI that actually helps teams work together sounds like progress worth celebrating.