Humans&, an artificial intelligence start-up, said it has raised $480 million (£357m) in a funding round valuing the three-month-old firm at $4.48bn, in a demonstration that investors remain highly motivated to plough funds into companies perceived to be innovating in the AI sector.

The round, which included investors such as Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and venture capital firms SV Angel and Google Ventures, is remarkable for a company that has only about 20 employees and has not yet released a product.

Humans& was founded by former researchers from Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI and focuses on the area of human-centric AI, or technology designed to build collaboration between automated systems and humans, rather than aiming to create automated systems that replace human actions.

The firm describes concepts such as an AI model that is able to collaborate effectively with a team of humans, asking questions, storing information for later use, and turning itself into a resource for ongoing work.

Company co-founder Georges Harik, who was also one of the leaders of the funding round, was Google’s seventh employee and worked on the launch of Gmail and Google Docs and led the acquisition of Android.

Humans& co-founder and chief executive Eric Zelikman previously worked at xAI, contributing training data for its Grok-2 chatbot, and has worked on reasoning-focused reinforcement learning methods.