Despite losing three of its five co-founders, H has managed to raise $230 million in funding and is currently raising a Series A for further development. The company has been working with customers in e-commerce, banking, insurance, and outsourcing to refine the product. CEO Charles Kantor describes H as part of the second era of AI, with the first era being companies like OpenAI. He also claims that their compact models outperform those from Anthropic, Mistral, and Meta.
Key takeaways:
- Paris startup H, founded by Google alums, is announcing its first product, Runner H, an AI aimed at businesses and developers for tasks like quality assurance and process automation.
- Runner H will initially focus on three specific use cases: robotic process automation (RPA), quality assurance, and business process outsourcing.
- H is raising a Series A to build what CEO Charles Kantor describes as part of the second era of AI, with the company having already raised $230 million in a mixture of equity and convertible debt.
- Despite the trend of increasing parameters in LLMs, Runner H is built on a compact LLM with just 2 billion parameters, which Kantor argues makes it more efficient in terms of cost and operations.