The H of the Agentic AI Movement

The ex-DeepMind affiliated startup that is for AI Agents

Hello Everyone,

It could have been London, but after Brexit London is sort of well, not the center of Europe any longer. With Germany significantly behind in Generative AI, it could only be Paris. Paris, France has been chosen by a powerful elite to be the Generative AI center of Europe. But why?

A number of billionaires are successfully making Paris the nexus of AI of Europe. This is also part of lobbying campaign to make Europe and France, more similar to how the U.S. works in terms of AI regulation and scaling startups that favors the U.S.’s emphasis on BigTech owning the majority of the revenue generation from this movement.

The Generative AI bull market and hype will produce some winners. Already Mistral comes to mind, but there is another possibly in the “Agentic AI” space.

I’ve spoken about it before how 2024 is the foundational year for AI agents and LLM systems that can automate task flows. We see this in the new partnerships between Microsoft and the makers of Devin, Cognition AI labs. The existing hype aren’t the real first-movers. I don’t believe OpenAI, Cognition or Magic will get things right. I have more faith in H. What the heck?

Formerly known as Holistic AI, I’ve covered them before, now they are just H. Why is this important?

The Chosen One of Agentic AI

This is the tech optimism showing their cards in making Paris, France the next Generative AI center of the world. I don’t even understand the pedigree of Charles A. Kantor, but I can follow the money. Make no mistake, like Mistral, this is a GDM spin-off.

The four other co-founders all previously worked for DeepMind, the AI company owned by Google: Karl Tuyls was a research director at DeepMind, where he worked on game theory and multi-agent research. Laurent Sifre was a principal scientist who contributed to many of DeepMind’s flagship projects, such as AlphaGo, AlphaFold and AlphaStar. More recently, he also worked on Google’s Gemini and Gemma AI models. Daan Wierstra, who will become H’s chief scientist, was a founding member at DeepMind. And, finally, Julien Perolat worked on game theory and multi-agent research at DeepMind.

Just like how Mistral was “manufactured” with big money, the same is occuring here.

A Seed round of $220 million? Do you know how rare that is? Even in the hype of Generative AI?

Emergence of Frontier Action Models (FAMs)

H wants to create artificial intelligence (AI) agents that can replace human labor-intensive tasks, increasing worker productivity through the use of "frontier action models."

Where do I see this working out? In Finance, Law and Education. Agentic AI is not all about automating coding tasks.

H(+) is a bit like the symbol of transhumanism.

Bloomberg had revealed on May 7th, that Holistic AI, a new startup in Paris working to leapfrog other generative AI models, has closed the first tranche of a $200 million initial financing round, according to people familiar with the deal. 

The H founding team has already put together a group of 25 engineers and scientists, which indicates the startup plans to move quickly. Comparatively, Mistral AI, another well-funded AI company, has been much more conservative when it comes to hiring, according to Bloomberg.

By far the most interesting thing about the era of Generative AI hype of 2023 to 2025 is all the people who have left Google DeepMind, Google Brain, Meta, OpenAI, and Amazon to found their own companies.

xAI getting nearly $8 Billion in funding is how things are moving in this AI arms race around Generative AI. The likes of Cohere and Anthropic also need to do huge rounds to keep up. Scale AI has recently with a fairly good Trust and Safety idea (coming soon). But in Agentic AI, even OpenAI and Google have disappointed leaving the way for new startups.

The Next era of RPA