Holistic gets huge $200 million for Paris AI Startup

Yet another former GDM startup in Paris gets huge funding.

Hello Everyone

Technically I’m on break until May, but yet another Paris based ex-Google DeepMind startup has gotten considerable funding. We talked about them earlier in the year as part of the rising Paris Generative AI scene for startups, especially those formerly at Google DeepMind.

Insider and others report that Holistic AI has gotten over $200 million in funding. This company operates in a really emerging and important niche. This is not the same Holistic AI that does AI risk and safety products based in the UK, but a startup working primarily on agentic AI foundational models.

Back in January, 2024 it was reported that a pair of scientists at Google DeepMind, Laurent Sifre and Karl Tuyls, are reportedly in discussions with potential investors to establish their own artificial intelligence (AI) startup in Paris. It seems those talks are about to conclude nearing May, 2024 and it means they will become a major AI startup in Paris, bolstering already a good lineup of new companies there.

This also signals yet another team within Google DeepMind that have gone their own way, as Bloomberg has signaled the move around 5 months ago.

They are like the Mistral of AI regulation in a sense. Mistral also got huge funding out of the blue and have made a name for themselves in the Generative AI open-source (open-weight) space.

The team at Holistic have two co-CEOs, Charles Kantor and Karl Tuyls. Besides the scoop by Insider, they have not official come out of stealth or done PR on the raise, so it may not be fully finalized.

Holistic will also be focused on new multi-agent AGI, according to investor sources. That is they want to build and generate frontier multi-agent and multi-modal foundational models. Agentic AI is one of the buzzwords without much to show from the likes of Cognitive Labs, Magic AI d others who are also flirting with the AGI terminology. It’s not yet clear what agentic AI properties OpenAI’s GPT-5 might have.

This $200 million Series A is large enough to allow them to scale to become a leader in this nascent industry. More details on the funding round should emerge soon.

The round should reach closer to $220 million. Both scientists are considered leaders in the field, the report said. Sifre co-authored groundbreaking 2016 DeepMind research on the capabilities of AI systems in the game of Go. Tuyls has researched game theory and multi-agent reinforcement learning. 

Holistic is in a position where they could collaborate with Mistral, Kyuntai and others to build France’s overall Generative AI competitiveness and for the EU. The UK and Germany are not exactly thriving in this new nascent space so far in the early 2020s. Will Holistic become the ‘Mistral of Agentic AI’ is the question?