Three month-old French AI startup loses three out of five founders after raising $220m

H, a French AI startup founded last May with a ‘seed’ round of $220 million, has seen three of its five founders resign.

The three, who cited ‘operational differences’ as their reason for resigning, are Karl Tuyls, Daan Wierstra and Julien Perolat.

Karl Tuyls was a research director at DeepMind, where he worked on game theory and multi-agent research. Daan Wierstra, who was to be H’s chief scientist, was a founding member at DeepMind. Julien Perolat worked on game theory and multi-agent research at DeepMind.

The other two founders are Laurent Sifre who was involved in the DeepMind projects AlphaGo, AlphaFold and AlphaStar and in the Google Gemini and Gemma AI models and Charles Kantor, H’s CEO, who was a researcher at Stanford. H has recruited 25 staff,

H says it’s working on “frontier action models to boost the productivity of workers.” It says it’s targeting full artificial general intelligence.

Investors in H include: Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, Yuri Milner, Bernard Arnault, Motier Ventures, Accel, Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund, Creandum, Elaia Partners, Eurazeo, FirstMark Capital, Visionaries Club, Amazon, Samsung and UiPath.

“While this has been a difficult decision for all parties involved, all are in agreement that this will enable the company’s greatest success moving forward and H continues to have the full support of its investors and strategic partners,” says an H company statement.