A new startup known simply as H has closed a mammoth $220 million seed round to build cutting-edge artificial intelligence models.

The Paris-based company, which is incorporated as H.ai SAS, disclosed the raise today. The round included contributions from Accel and other investment firms, as well as several major tech industry players: H said Amazon.com Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and UiPath Inc. were among the participants. Former Google LLC Chief Executive Eric Schmidt chipped in as well.

H is led by CEO Charles Kantor, a former Stanford University researcher. The company’s four other co-founders previously held senior technical positions at Google’s DeepMind machine learning lab. They worked on AI systems such as AlphaFold, which is helping scientists gain a better understanding of proteins and other biological molecules.

H’s founders have recruited 20 AI engineers and researchers to support their work. The company said it’s building foundation models with the ability to process multimodal data, or data that comprises not only text but also items such as images and audio files. H said that the algorithms will be capable of “reasoning, planning and collaboration.”

One of the use cases the company plans to prioritize is helping enterprises automate business tasks. According to H, its AI models will also be geared toward consumers. That suggests the company may package some of the models into consumer services such as a cloud-based chatbot.

“The team unites around a simple yet ambitious mission: to drive the productivity of billions forward,” Kantor said. “We’re committed to transforming entire industries as well as the everyday human experience, bringing that human-computer tandem into reality and paving the way towards full-AGI.”

H has not shared technical information about its software. According to Bloomberg, the company highlighted its founders’ expertise in multi-agent AI software to investors while raising the seed round announced today. Multi-agent AI is a machine learning approach that allows several different neural networks to collaborate on complex tasks.

While H was raising the round, investors reportedly “discussed putting in roughly 40% of the financing in equity.” The rest was to be provided in the form of convertible debt, a type of debt that the lender can turn into shares down the road. UiPath, one of the participants in the round, is said to have contributed $32.5 million.

H will partner with the robotic process automation provider and other companies to support its go-to-market efforts. The company will also use its newly raised funding to acquire infrastructure for AI development projects. H’s long-term goal, it disclosed today, is to develop artificial general intelligence, or AI software that can perform a wide range of tasks on par with humans. 

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