H

Startup · Paris, France

H (formerly Holistic) represents France’s second-wave AI builders: less focused on text generation and more focused on action. Founded in 2024 by a team that included former DeepMind researchers such as Charles Kantor and Laurent Sifre, the company drew attention with a seed round that eclipsed prior European records, signaling investor appetite for agentic AI. H’s core thesis is that the next leap is not bigger language models but AI systems that can plan, execute, and verify multi-step workflows across real software interfaces. The company frames this as “RPA 2.0,” using vision-language models to interact with screens and applications rather than brittle scripts and APIs. The firm’s early months were turbulent, including leadership turnover in late 2024, but the product roadmap accelerated. In November 2025 H launched Runner H, a vision-language agent that can see a desktop and operate mouse and keyboard actions to complete tasks such as booking travel, compiling invoices, or processing customer tickets. The release of Surfer-H-CLI soon after gave developers a programmable surface for building web agents, which helped H win mindshare with the European developer community. An acquisition of Mithril Security in 2025 signaled a focus on secure, private agent deployment — a crucial requirement for enterprise adoption, where the biggest fear is an autonomous agent mishandling data or credentials. H is deeply embedded in the Paris AI ecosystem, with early incubation support from Aglae Ventures and strong ties to the Paris AI Hub around Sorbonne and Ecole Polytechnique. Its backers read like a who’s-who of strategic supporters: Accel led financing, Eric Schmidt invested personally, and strategic relationships with Amazon and UiPath position H as a bridge between cloud infrastructure and automation workflows. French tech patrons Xavier Niel and Bernard Arnault provide both capital and political signal value. By early 2026, H is widely watched as a potential category leader in action-oriented AI, competing to become the default “application layer” for autonomous digital workers across Europe’s enterprises.

https://www.hcompany.ai