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After the success of Mistral, another French startup comes to challenge OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. You've probably never heard of H or The “H” Company (hcompany.ai). However, it could become one of the best alternatives to the OpenAI or Google models in the world.
This new player, founded at the end of 2023, has just formalized funding of $220 million raised from international investors, including Accel, UiPath Inc., Bpifrance, via its Large Venture fund, Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, FirstMark, Elaia Partners, Eurazeo, Yuri Milner and Amazon.
“The investment will be used to pursue and develop the company’s research talents. Additionally, the capital will be used to acquire the computing power and data crucial to achieving breakthroughs in agentic models, supporting “H”’s vision of achieving full-featured artificial general intelligence (AGI).” , we can read in a press release from Bpifrance.
A promising team
For now, H's website only states that this young startup's mission is to build action-based models that will “increase worker productivity.” In any case, according to TechCrunch's explanations, if H was able to raise $220 million so early, it is thanks to its founding team which is made up of experts in the field of AI.
Charles Kantor, co-founder and CEO of the startup, is a researcher at Stanford University. “We are determined to transform entire industries and our daily experiences, making the human-computer tandem a reality, and paving the way for more general and comprehensive Intelligence”, he says in the press release.
And the four other co-founders are former employees of DeepMind, Google's subsidiary specializing in AI. Laurent Sifre, one of these co-founders, worked on Google's Gemini model and on Gemma.
- After Mistral, another French startup is positioning itself as one of the alternatives to the OpenAI models
- Called H, it has just raised $220 million from international investors including Accel, UiPath Inc., Bpifrance, via its Large Venture fund, Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, FirstMark, Elaia Partners, Eurazeo, Yuri Milner and Amazon
- The CEO and co-founder of H is a Stanford researcher
- The other four co-founders are former employees of the AI branch of Google (one of them even worked on Gemini)
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