France has never hidden its desire to be one of the leaders in AI in the world. In the wake of Mistral AI or the Claude chatbot, developed by Anthropic, a new start-up is appearing in France: H.
Investments from tech giants
Launched on Tuesday May 21, the company has already raised 220 million dollars (around 202.7 million euros), thanks to investments from Xavier Niel, Bernard Arnault and even Amazon. H is led by Charles Kantor, a former student at Stanford University.
In a press release from Bpifrance, which also participated in the financing of the start-up, it is explained that the ambition is to “advance the productivity of billions of people”.
The boss of the French start-up explains that “the team of 25 engineers and researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) is on a mission to introduce the power of generative AI (GenAI) into businesses around the world through a new generation of multimodal models specialized on action. And to add that “these action foundation models will know how to reason, plan and collaborate, thus revolutionizing entire sectors and making AGI (artificial general intelligence, whose capabilities approach or surpass those of humans) soon a reality“.
The launch of the start-up H is accompanied by congratulations from the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, on X.
As stated 20 minutesexperts estimated, in mid-March, that France must invest 5 billion euros per year, over 5 years, in research on AI to compete with its main competitors: China and the United States.