This time last year, investors were pouring money into a fresh crop of newly-launched generative AI startups, with founders often boasting industry leaders like Meta or Google DeepMind on their CVs.
As the funding frenzy unfurled, Paris quickly emerged as a key hub for AI investment. Within months of being set up, buzzy French companies like LLM-maker Mistral, biotech Bioptimus and agentic AI startup H Company were winning tens of millions of dollars in investment.
In May 2024, H raised a $220m seed round off the back of promises to develop AGI (artificial general intelligence), the holy grail of AI research which proponents say could overtake human intelligence. H won kudos from French president Emmanuel Macron — and then effectively retreated back into stealth mode.
Nine months on, the company’s social media profiles feature only a handful of posts relating to two notable developments: the departure of three of its five original cofounders just three months after securing the seed round, and the release in beta of H’s first product, an agentic AI model dubbed Runner H, in November.
The business is now led by CTO Laurent Sifre, previously a scientist at Google DeepMind for nearly 10 years, and CEO Charles Kantor, a former Stanford University computational mathematics researcher.
But two sources close to the business tell Sifted investors in the company are getting few updates on the company’s development and roadmap.
Investors who sit on the board — which includes Accel partner Philippe Botteri — are kept in the loop, but others receive little information, sources say.
Cofounders’ departure
H arrived with a bang when it raised a record $220m seed round last year. Led by Accel, the round included participation from a host of investors, including industry giants like Amazon, Samsung and UiPath, as well as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, US VC FirstMark, French billionaire Xavier Niel and Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner.
A handful of leading French and European investors also backed the company, such as Visionaries Club, Motier Ventures, Eurazeo and Elaia Partners and French public bank Bpifrance.
In addition to Kantor and Sifre, H originally included another three DeepMind alumni — Karl Tuyls, Julien Perolat and Daan Wierstra. The company said it planned to build “action models” that could autonomously carry out tasks for businesses.
By August 2024, Tuyls, Perolat and Wierstra had left, citing “operational differences”. Sources close to the company say the departing cofounders had not been actively involved with the company’s operations for months prior to their departure.
“Some of the employees never saw the cofounders, they never even worked together,” says one source. “They decided to leave very quickly, which was for the best.”
An update note written by an investor and seen by Sifted states that Q3 2024 “was challenging” and anticipated that Wierstra in particular would be difficult to replace due to his experience.
Two sources close to the company tell Sifted the news only caused “two or three” employees to leave. The note states that by Q4 2024, the restructuring of the founding team had been “digested”, and that “there was no major departure in the rest of the team.”
“From an external perspective, it wasn’t great,” one investor, who does not hold a stake in H, tells Sifted. “This kind of seed round essentially relies on backing the founders. So three of them leaving must have been difficult.”
According to the note, there were 35 employees at H as of Q3 2024. Based on LinkedIn data seen by Sifted, nine employees appear to have stopped working at the company in the past six months.
Runner H
In November, H released a private beta version of its first AI agent, Runner H. Developers can use Runner H to build automations for tasks like confirming orders on an e-commerce website or pre-filling multistep verification processes.
One source close to the company tells Sifted the release received positive feedback, which “calmed” concerns following the cofounders’ departure.
“Clearly, there is still everything to do,” they tell Sifted. “But they are in a much better position than six months ago.”
However, another source with knowledge of the company’s operations says that while the technology’s performance is good, there is a lack of leadership at the top that risks putting H behind.
“Some releases were supposed to be made that weren’t in the end,” they tell Sifted. “It shows a lack of firm decision-making from the management — it’s one step ahead and another one backwards.”
“The vision is not clear… Just when everyone else has been releasing agentic benchmarks results for the past couple of months.”
H is building a product in a field that is becoming fiercely competitive. US tech giant OpenAI launched an AI agent product, Operator, at the start of the year, while Google, Microsoft and Amazon are all working on similar products.
In Europe, French darling Mistral is developing agents, as well as London-founded 11x, which raised $74m across two rounds in 2024 before relocating to the US.
For now H is focusing on building Runner H, which it hasn’t started commercialising yet, in part because most of the team members are researchers and engineers.
The investor note states that the company has a strong partnership with UiPath, which builds robotic process automation (RPA) software. UiPath invested $35.2m in H, with plans to develop a “commercial relationship”.
The note also states that H has a “very comfortable” runway “with more than three years of visibility.”
Sifted approached H for comment.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/h-company-update/
