H Company, the mysterious Paris-based AI startup, has released a suite of new AI agents following months of stealth.
The startup entered the French tech scene with a bang last year when it raised a $220m seed round with a cofounding team that included four ex-Deepmind scientists. Three months later, three cofounders left the company, leaving Deepmind alum Laurent Sifre and CEO Charles Kantor to lead the business.
In November H released its first product, a generalist AI agent dubbed Runner H, in beta — and has since remained in stealth.
Now the startup has unveiled a fresh version of Runner H, as well as a web browsing agent called Surfer H and a third agent, Tester H, focusing on supporting a specific engineering task called web automation. Sifted previously reported Tester H was in the wraps.
“We want to push the paradigm from conversational AI to AI that can execute actions,” Kantor tells Sifted. “Agentic AI… is a generation of teammates that can augment our productivity.”
Kantor says that a year after launch H has a team of 70 people based between Paris and London. The startup is planning to open another office soon, he adds, “probably in the US”.
What can H’s new agents do?
Kantor describes Runner H as an “orchestrating agent”. The tool, which mostly targets enterprises, plugs into files and apps like Google Drive, Notion and Slack, and combines different agentic models to carry out tasks.
It can be prompted with natural language for actions ranging from creating a social media advertisement strategy to planning travelling and accommodation for a holiday.
Kantor says that H is already generating some revenue from testing Runner H in beta with “a cohort” of businesses based in France and abroad. Runner H is now available for specific deployments for enterprises, as well as for free (in a limited version) for consumers.
H is also launching Surfer H, an agent specialising in web browsing, which can be used by Runner H to complete actions. The model can be prompted for tasks such as finding a company’s latest published financial results or scanning for the latest job ads in a specific industry.
Surfer H is powered by an AI model called Holo-1, which the company is sharing in open source.
“OpenAI’s ChatGPT was closed source, and very quickly it was followed by Meta’s Llama,” says Kantor. “The revolution of AI agents also needs, to advance rapidly, high-performance open source models.”
The version of Holo-1 open-sourced by H is based on another open source AI model, Qwen, developed by Chinese cloud computing giant Alibaba Cloud, to which the French startup applied its own data mix and post-training technologies.
Holo-1 boasts a score of 92.2% on WebVoyager, the industry benchmark for browser agents, ahead of competitors like OpenAI’s agent Operator (87%), Google’s Project Mariner (90.5%) and YC-backed startup Laminar’s agent (92%).
Kantor says that Holo-1 is also 5.5x cheaper than its competitors on average.
Tester H
The third agent released by H, Tester H, specialises in helping engineers complete a task called web automation — which occurs when developers need to test web browsers, pages and mobile apps by simulating and repeating human interactions such as clicking buttons and filling forms. Developers typically automate web automation using software.
Tester H enables engineers to use natural language prompts to create web automation agents.
“The idea behind Tester H is to verticalise the technology for a specific job,” says Kantor.
He adds Tester H is being tested in beta with several businesses, and the tool will now be open to a number of new customers.
Last year H quietly acquired another French startup, Mithril Security, which develops tools to build AI agents for web automation. In parallel, Mithril also builds privacy-protecting tools to make AI safer.
“The reason we acquired Mithril was essentially on the aspect [of security] and for talent in that field,” says Kantor. “The [web automation] product was not our angle… Today that technology is not used in our products.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/h-company-releases-three-agents/
