3 Co-Founders Leave French AI Startup H Amid ‘Operational Differences’

French artificial intelligence (AI) startup H said Friday (Aug. 23) that three of its co-founders are leaving the company due to “operational differences.”

Co-founders Daan Wierstra, Karl Tuyls and Julien Perolat are leaving the company, H said in a Friday post on LinkedIn. Moving forward, the company will be led by CEO Charles A. Kantor and Chief Technology Officer Laurent Sifre.

“While this has been a difficult decision for all parties involved, all are in agreement that this will enable the company’s greatest moving forward and H continues to have the full support of its investors and strategic partners,” the company said in the post.

Wierstra, Tuyls and Perolat are three of the five co-founders of H, and are three of the four co-founders who joined the company from Alphabet’s AI lab, Google DeepMind, Bloomberg reported Friday.

Their departure comes before H released a product, according to the report.

H raised $220 million for its goal of building artificial general intelligence, Bloomberg reported May 21.

Kantor told Bloomberg at the time that the company is working towards “full-AGI,” a reference to artificial general intelligence, a level of AI that matches or exceeds human capabilities.

Before a rebranding that was announced on May 21, H was known as Holistic AI. (Holistic is the name of a separate AI company based in the United Kingdom.)

H is among the artificial intelligence agent startups that have caught the attention of investors and attracted investments with valuations ahead of their business fundamentals, PYMNTS reported in June.

In its Friday post on LinkedIn, H said that the company “continues on its journey” and that it plans to release a series of models and products before the end of the year.

“When H Company launched earlier this year, the team set out to advance the power of GenAI to people and businesses globally via a new generation of action models,” the company said in the post. “Today, H’s team of almost 40 engineers and researchers remain committed to this vision, developing cutting edge action capabilities that enhance worker productivity and push the frontiers of AI research and engineering.”