H Company, the Paris-based startup building AI agents, has announced the departure of CEO Charles Kantor just over a year after raising a $220m seed round. Former Palantir exec Gautier Cloix has been appointed as the company’s new CEO.
It comes after a turbulent start for H. The company launched last year with five cofounders including Kantor and four DeepMind alumni. Three months after announcing the seed round, three cofounders left the company citing “operational differences.”
It left Kantor and DeepMind alum Laurent Sifre to lead the startup.
Cloix, who has spent 10 years as director for France at US big data giant Palantir, is now joining H to scale the business’s commercial operations “across Europe and worldwide”, said the company in a statement.
This comes off the back of H launching its first publicly-available agents last week after months of stealth.
“[Cloix’s] go-to-market expertise will reinforce H’s ambition to make its AI agents the global standard for enterprises,” said the company.
According to the statement Kantor will remain “an important shareholder and will continue to be involved in H’s journey.” Sifre will remain the company’s CTO.
What does H Company do?
H, which is backed by US VC Accel and robotic automation software company UiPath, launched to build AI agents — a type of AI that is intended to automate tasks.
Last week the company released a series of agents including a new version of its flagship product Runner H, which enables users to use natural language to carry out tasks ranging from creating a social media ad strategy to planning travel and accommodation for a holiday.
It has also developed an agent called Tester H dedicated to a specific engineering task known as web automation.
Kantor previously told Sifted the company is already working with “a cohort” of businesses in France and abroad, with its products largely targeting enterprise users.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/h-company-ceo-charles-kantor-replaced-by-former-palantir-exec/
