Agentic AI Platforms

H (formerly Holistic AI, France) raised a record $220M seed round to build agentic AI — systems that don't just respond to prompts but autonomously plan, reason, and execute complex multi-step tasks across software interfaces. Founded by former DeepMind scientist Charles Kantor, H represents a bet that the next AI frontier is action, not conversation.

The company's Runner H platform combines a large language model with a compact vision-language model, enabling AI agents to navigate user interfaces, click buttons, fill forms, and complete workflows without human intervention. This is fundamentally different from chatbot-style AI: it's software that operates other software.

The Paris AI ecosystem that produced H (alongside Mistral, Poolside, and Bioptimus) is now the densest concentration of frontier AI talent outside San Francisco. The proximity to École Polytechnique, DeepMind's Paris office, and Meta's FAIR lab creates a talent flywheel. H's acquisition of Mithril Security (May 2025) added confidential computing capabilities — ensuring that agentic AI can operate on sensitive enterprise data without exposure, addressing the sovereignty concerns that differentiate European AI from US competitors.