H, the Paris startup founded by Google alums, made a big splash last summer when, out of the blue, it announced a seed round of $220 million before releasing a single product. Three months later, still without a product, that splash started to look like a catastrophic flood when three of the company’s five co-founders left over “operational and business disagreements.”
But the company has kept swimming, and today it’s announcing its first product: Runner H, an “agentic” AI aimed at businesses and developers across tasks like quality assurance and process automation. It’s built atop the startup’s own, proprietary “compact” LLM based on just 2 billion parameters.
H has set up a waitlist for Runner H on its site. CEO Charles Kantor said that it will be releasing APIs to those on the list over the coming days to use agents “off the shelf” that have been pre-built by H, as well as for developers to create their own. Access to the API will also come along with access to something called H-Studio to test and manage how these services work.
Initially, using those APIs will be free, and later there will be a payment model introduced.
Even using compact LLMs, building and running AI is not cheap, especially as competition continues to raise money to develop their own products. TechCrunch has also confirmed that H is raising a Series A to build what Kantor describes as part of the second era of AI — with LLM companies like OpenAI being part of the first era.
“We are lucky to be in the position of building our own models,” Kantor said. “But this second era will be as capital intensive as first one.”
(Recall the $230 …