Emotional intelligence is emerging as the defining edge in artificial intelligence investment. Former xAI researcher and Stanford Ph.D. student Eric Zelikman’s new company, Humans&, has secured $1 billion in funding, aiming for a market valuation between $4 and $5 billion, according to multiple sources familiar with the negotiations.
The funding round, still underway, demonstrates unprecedented confidence despite no disclosed product yet.
At just 27, Zelikman is leveraging his experience with Elon Musk’s xAI, where he contributed to the Grok chatbot’s reasoning engine before departing in September 2025.
His leadership is attracting elite talent and top investors in a market environment where AI funding has soared to record highs.
How Did Humans& Attract $1 Billion in Early Funding?
The Humans& funding round is indicative of soaring appetite for artificial intelligence startups led by proven researchers. Sources say the company is pursuing a $4-5 billion valuation while still in stealth mode, with details of terms subject to ongoing discussion.
The willingness of prominent backers to commit such capital early shows their belief in the transformative potential of emotional AI.
In 2025 alone, global investment in AI startups reached $73.1 billion in the first quarter, nearly 58% of all venture capital deployed.
This environment helped Humans& join the ranks of high-profile deals like Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Labs and Safe Superintelligence, co-founded by Ilya Sutskever, both of which raised $2 billion each at massive early-stage valuations.
Did you know?
Eric Zelikman was a Member of Technical Staff at xAI from March 2024 to September 2025, where he was an early employee and a key contributor to the pretraining data for Grok 2, scaled reinforcement learning for reasoning for Grok 3 Thinking, and built the agent RL infrastructure and recipe for Grok 4.
Who Are the Visionaries Behind Humans&?
Eric Zelikman is not making the journey alone. The Humans& founding team includes influential figures from across the AI research landscape.
Among them is Google’s seventh employee, Georges Harik, who co-created AdWords and AdSense; Stanford computational psychology professor Noah Goodman; and Anthropic’s behavioral reinforcement expert, Andi Peng.
Together, these co-founders represent decades of combined leadership from Google, Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind.
This powerhouse lineup signals a commitment to advancing not just technological performance, but the human aspects of artificial intelligence.
The cross-pollination of AI research between academic and industry settings provides the venture with a strong foundation for ambitious goals.
What Makes Humans& Approach to AI Unique?
Humans& is staking its future on building emotionally intelligent AI that sees each user as more than an isolated interaction. Unlike current mainstream chatbots, these future models will remember user preferences, understand context across conversations, and adapt to individual goals.
Zelikman explained in a podcast that today’s chatbots “don't really care about the person on the other end,” highlighting a core challenge in present-day AI.
His prior work, including coauthoring the "Quiet-STaR" paper, advanced machine reasoning by having AI internally work through problems before responding.
The next step, he believes, is endowing AI with the ability to understand long-term implications, not just to answer but to collaborate on human objectives at scale.
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Why Is Emotional Intelligence the Next AI Frontier?
As AI’s technical leaps raise both opportunities and anxieties, Zelikman’s vision is to position AI as an ally rather than a replacement. He argues society will solve fundamental problems more effectively by designing models able to empathize with and adapt to people’s ambitions and values.
The assembling of experts from major AI labs reflects the belief that the next breakthroughs will come from novel approaches to understanding people, not just crunching data.
Given the saturated market for purely technical advances, investors and researchers alike seek differentiation.
Emotional intelligence, or EQ, grants AI the nuance to personalize, collaborate, and support, transforming the landscape from transactional scripts to dynamic, meaningful partnerships.
Will Investor Appetite Sustain High AI Valuations?
The deluge of capital flowing into AI startups has given rise to warnings from some cautious voices. Bryan Yeo of Singapore’s GIC has noted the risk of hype-driven valuations, where branding alone draws multi-billion dollar checks even before product-market fit.
While this brings opportunities like Humans&, it may also test the resilience of both companies and investors if timelines for breakthroughs prove longer than anticipated.
Humans& symbolizes the new thesis in AI funding: that small, diverse teams of world-class researchers, working in collaboration, can solve immense challenges in human and machine understanding.
Whether the dream of collaborative, emotionally aware AI comes to fruition, this bold pursuit seems set to push human-centric innovation to the next level. The coming years may show whether valuation and vision align for the next era of intelligent machines.
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