H Company

Overview

H Company — known simply as H, and originally as Holistic AI — is the Paris-based artificial intelligence startup that raised a then-record $220 million seed round in May 2024 and then lost nearly its entire founding team within two years. Legally, it is H COMPANY, a simplified joint-stock company (SAS) registered with the Paris trade registry on April 11, 2024, headquartered at 22 Rue Drouot in Paris’s 9th arrondissement (Pappers). The company builds “frontier action models” — AI agents designed to automate tasks traditionally done by human workers (TechCrunch). By September 2026, none of its five original cofounders remained in day-to-day operational roles (Sifted, French Tech Journal).

This profile covers only this entity. It is not the same as other, unrelated companies or pages that use the letter H in their names — see the final section.

The record seed round and the “frontier action models” pitch

H emerged from stealth in May 2024 and announced its $220 million seed round “just a few months after the company’s inception,” making it at the time the largest AI seed round in Europe (TechCrunch, Sifted). The money followed the team: cofounder and CEO Charles Kantor was a former Stanford researcher, and the four other cofounders were all former Google DeepMind scientists — Karl Tuyls, a research director working on game theory and multi-agent research; Laurent Sifre, a principal scientist who had contributed to AlphaGo, AlphaFold and AlphaStar and, more recently, Google’s Gemini and Gemma models; Daan Wierstra, a founding member of DeepMind who was to become H’s chief scientist; and Julien Perolat, another game-theory and multi-agent researcher (TechCrunch).

The investor list was a who’s-who of European tech money: Accel, Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund, Creandum, Elaia Partners, Eurazeo, FirstMark Capital and Visionaries Club on the VC side; Amazon, Samsung and UiPath as industrial backers (Sifted previously reported UiPath invested $35.2 million); and billionaires Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, Yuri Milner, Bernard Arnault (via Aglaé Ventures) and Motier Ventures (TechCrunch, Sifted). The financing was unusual in structure: around 40% was traditional equity, with the rest in convertible debt — Sifted put the bond portion at up to $120 million — and the company had already assembled 25 engineers and scientists (TechCrunch, Sifted). H said its agents would reason, plan and collaborate across multi-step tasks — and, like nearly every 2024 AI pitch, invoked full artificial general intelligence as the destination, a claim TechCrunch met with open skepticism: “that’s a marketing promise since nobody knows if or when AGI will happen” (Sifted, TechCrunch).

The exodus, the rebuild, and a Palantir playbook

Three months after the seed announcement, three of the five cofounders — Tuyls, Wierstra and Perolat — resigned, citing “operational differences” (Electronics Weekly). The company’s statement insisted all parties agreed the split would enable H’s greatest success and that investors and strategic partners remained fully supportive (Electronics Weekly). It left Kantor and Sifre to lead the company (Sifted).

The first product came in November 2024: Runner H, an “agentic” AI aimed at businesses and developers for quality assurance, robotic process automation and business process outsourcing, built on a proprietary “compact” LLM of just 2 billion parameters plus a vision model — a deliberate bet against the parameter race (TechCrunch). Kantor said the company had been quietly working with customers in e-commerce, banking, insurance and outsourcing, and TechCrunch confirmed H was raising a Series A — with total funding then at roughly $230 million (TechCrunch).

Then the leadership turned over again. In June 2025, cofounder-CEO Charles Kantor was replaced by Gautier Cloix, who had spent ten years as Palantir’s director for France; Kantor remained “an important shareholder and will continue to be involved in H’s journey,” while Sifre stayed on as CTO (Sifted). The French registry confirms Cloix’s presidency from June 6, 2025 (Pappers). In his first interview, Cloix said the company’s “backbone” — Sifre and the models — was intact, and laid out a plan borrowed directly from Palantir: deploy “forward deployed engineers” to embed with large French enterprises and let real-world constraints set the product roadmap (Sifted). H had pilots running with enterprises from hospitality to finance, but Cloix said it was “too early” to name real customers (Sifted).

The churn wasn’t over. By September 2026, Sifted reported that cofounder Laurent Sifre — the last of the five still in an operational role — had joined Microsoft (Sifted). A French Tech Journal roundup, citing Sifted, added detail: Sifre joined Microsoft’s AI research team in Paris, meaning the entire five-person founding team had departed within two years of the company’s creation, while H under Cloix was reinventing itself around “computer-use” agents and had joined Nvidia’s Nemotron coalition alongside Mistral (French Tech Journal).

What this profile does not claim

This profile covers the Paris AI startup legally registered as H COMPANY (SAS, Paris), founded by Kantor, Tuyls, Sifre, Wierstra and Perolat, which raised the $220 million seed in May 2024. It is explicitly not the “H Company” described on some low-quality web pages as founded in 2022 and led by a “Thomas Durand” with €50 million in funding — those contradictory facts match no verified source and were excluded entirely. The profile does not assert a 2023 founding date; the French registry records incorporation on April 11, 2024, and secondary sources disagree on when the company was actually founded, so only the registry date is stated as fact. It does not assert the reported Mithril Security acquisition (2025) or the Surfer-H-CLI and Holo-1 model releases (2025), because the available sources for those claims could not be fully read and verified. The claim that Laurent Sifre joined Microsoft rests on a Sifted exclusive whose article body fetched as obfuscated text — only its headline and standfirst were legible — corroborated by a second outlet; it is carried with that caveat rather than as a fully-verified detail. No first-party sources were used; H’s own website and statements (as relayed through its press communications) are excluded, and quoted company statements appear only as reported by independent outlets.