frontier-ai-lab
(6)
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.
Voio
Voio is a Berkeley-based frontier AI lab building a unified reading platform for radiology. Spun out of UC Berkeley and UCSF, it develops the open-source Pillar family of models that interpret CT, MRI and X-ray scans across hundreds of conditions, aiming to help radiologists work faster without trading away accuracy. The company exited stealth in November 2025 with $8.6M in seed funding.
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.
Andy Markoff
Andy Markoff is the co-founder and CEO of Smack Technologies, an El Segundo defense startup he calls the first frontier AI lab built for national security. A former Marine Raider who served as an operations officer during the Battle of Mosul and later worked on Palantir's strategy team, Markoff is building AI products - Omega for the command center and Alpha for the edge - aimed at compressing military planning from days into minutes. In March 2026 the company announced $32 million in combined Seed and Series A funding led by Geodesic Capital and Costanoa Ventures, behind a thesis Markoff sums up bluntly: 'Decision Dominance will be the deciding factor in preventing WWIII because it's the only goal achievable before 2027.'
Ricursive Intelligence
Ricursive Intelligence is a Palo Alto frontier AI lab using artificial intelligence to compress the slow, expensive process of semiconductor design. Founded in late 2025 by Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, the co-creators of Google's AlphaChip, the company is building an end-to-end AI model that designs, verifies and closes silicon, aiming to create a recursive loop where AI designs better chips and those chips train better AI. It raised $335M across seed and Series A rounds, reaching a $4B valuation roughly two months after launch.
Smack Technologies Inc.
Smack Technologies is a frontier AI lab for national security, founded in 2024 by two Marine Special Operations veterans, Andy Markoff and Clint Alanis. The company builds domain-specific AI models trained through deep reinforcement learning inside proprietary synthetic warfare environments. Its goal is what it calls 'Decision Dominance' - compressing the Orient and Decide phases of the military OODA loop from months to minutes. Two product suites carry the work: Omega, a command-level stack that turns commander intent into executable plans, and Alpha, an edge stack with lightweight models and proprietary hardware for tactical platforms operating in degraded, low-bandwidth conditions. Smack raised $32M in combined seed and Series A funding led by Geodesic Capital and Costanoa Ventures, and has secured seven-figure contracts with the Joint Fires Network and the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab.