eric-zelikman
(2)
humans&
humans& is a human-centric frontier AI lab based in the San Francisco Bay Area, founded in September 2025 by researchers and builders from xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Stanford. Rather than building AI to replace people, the company designs models and products around how humans connect, communicate, and work together - investing in long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory, and user understanding. It launched publicly in January 2026 with a $480 million all-cash seed round at a roughly $4.48 billion valuation, backed by NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, SV Angel, GV, and Emerson Collective.
Eric Zelikman
Eric Zelikman is the co-founder and CEO of humans&, a human-centric frontier AI lab in Redwood City building foundation models designed for communication and collaboration rather than automation. A former early researcher at xAI, he helped shape Grok's pretraining data and scaled reinforcement learning for reasoning across Grok 3 and Grok 4. Before that, as a Stanford PhD candidate, he authored STaR and Quiet-STaR, foundational papers that taught language models to reason in natural language using their own rationales. In January 2026, humans& emerged from stealth with a $480M seed round at a roughly $4.48B valuation, backed by Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, GV, SV Angel and Emerson Collective.