H, the French artificial intelligence startup founded by veterans of Google AI lab DeepMind and backed by billionaires including LVMH boss Bernard Arnault, is preparing for another round of funding after announcing its first product.
According to CEO Charles Kantor, who co-founded the startup with DeepMind alum Laurent Sifre, the Paris-based AI company operates on less money than its competitors and needs to raise more capital. The company plans to launch more products before the end of the year and the next round of funding could come “in the next few months,” he said in an interview.
H was founded earlier this year to develop “AI agents” that can automatically perform a range of tasks on behalf of a user. said in a blog post on Tuesday that its first such agent is now available for testing.
The company released a video of “Runner H,” which is based on its AI model and automatically searches Apple Inc.’s website to find a slogan for its latest series of watches. H also published evaluation data showing that the product was superior to other active ingredients.
H’s Seeds round was a symbol of investors’ appetite for all things AI, attracting $220 million, an unusually large amount of initial funding for a company that had yet to bring a product to market. Investors in this round included Accel Partners LP, Amazon.com Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and billionaires like Arnault through his venture capital fund and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
H operates in a highly competitive environment that also includes AI heavyweights such as Microsoft Corp. and Anthropic develop autonomous agent tools.
His first year was marred by this departure co-founders Karl Tuyls, Daan Wierstra and Julien Perolat about what H called “operational differences.” The three had previously worked at DeepMind.
“That’s a thing of the past,” Kantor said of the departures, pointing to a growing team of 50 engineers and sales staff in Paris and London.
Kantor said he envisions H’s product being used by companies that want to automate tasks like website testing and finding new employees.