French AI Startup Backed by Arnault Plans to Raise More Funds

(Bloomberg) — H, the French artificial intelligence startup founded by veterans of Google’s DeepMind AI lab and backed by billionaires including LVMH Chief Executive Officer Bernard Arnault, is preparing for another funding round after announcing its first product.

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The Paris-based AI firm is operating with less money than its competitors and will need to seek more capital, according to CEO Charles Kantor, who founded the startup with DeepMind alum Laurent Sifre. The company plans to release more products before the end of the year and the next financing round may come “in the next few months,” he said in an interview.

H, formed earlier this year to build “AI agents” that can automatically perform a range of tasks on a user’s behalf, said in a blog post Tuesday that its first such agent is now available for testing.

The company posted a video of “Runner H,” built off its AI model, automatically browsing Apple Inc.’s website to find a slogan for its latest watch series. H also posted evaluation data that, it said, showed the product outperforms other agents.

H’s seed round was emblematic of investors’ appetite for all things AI, attracting $220 million, an unusually large initial funding amount for a company that hadn’t yet released a product. Investors in that round included Accel Partners LP, Amazon.com Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and billionaires such as Arnault via his venture capital fund and former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt.

H is operating in an intensely competitive space, with AI heavyweights including Microsoft Corp. and Anthropic also developing autonomous agent tools.

Its first year was marred by the departure of co-founders Karl Tuyls, Daan Wierstra and Julien Perolat over what H called “operational differences.” The three had previously worked at DeepMind.

“This is the past,” Kantor said of the departures, pointing to a growing team of 50 engineers and sales employees in Paris and London.

Kantor said he envisions H’s product being used by companies looking to automate tasks such as website testing and searching for new hires.

–With assistance from Mark Bergen.