Humans is an early-stage AI-native venture fund investing in the next generation of products and technologies that maximize human potential. We back founders revolutionizing the way we work, play, socialize, spend, and live. We take a human-first approach to investing and aim to partner with high slope, under-the-radar founders at the earliest stages of company building.
- Akash Nigam is the Founder & CEO of Genies, an AI avatar and games technology company powering the next generation of digital experiences. Genies has raised over $250 million from investors like Bob Iger, NEA, BOND Capital, and Silver Lake. Through Genies, Akash has partnered with many of culture’s leading icons and tastemakers like Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Russell Westbrook, Jake Paul, and Shawn Mendes to create avatars for their content and likeness.
- Andrew Tan is a repeat founder who dropped out of Stanford to start his last company Nova, a professional community platform for Gen Z. Nova exited to Handshake in 2023, where Andrew stayed on to build out the generative AI team. He created the TLDR AI newsletter, the biggest daily AI newsletter in the world with about 700,000 subscribers. Andrew is a prolific angel investor in 50+ AI companies like Anthropic, Decagon, Mercor, Runway ML, Pika, Pinecone, Coframe, Haize Labs, Goodfire AI, and Gumloop.
Our superpower is our ability to capture distribution and attention. As repeat founders, we have experienced firsthand that “first-time founders focus on product, second-time founders focus on distribution.” At Genies, Akash led the company to dominate the celebrity avatar space and secured partnerships with many of the marquee organizations in entertainment, music, and sports like the NBA Players Association, NFL, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group. Akash and the Genies team are experts at capturing the attention of consumers, especially Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Meanwhile, Andrew’s TLDR AI is the biggest AI newsletter in the world with 700,000 subscribers. It’s the go-to resource for founders, investors, researchers, and decision-makers in AI. Together, we deeply understand how to drive engagement, build communities, and create cultural momentum.
We firmly believe that the best early-stage investors are founders supporting other founders. Having built and exited multiple companies, we want to bring our experience to help founders navigate every stage of their journey — from idea to IPO and beyond. While we’ll look at literally anything, we’re particularly excited about platform shifts that fundamentally change user behaviors like Generative AI, AR/VR, and embodied intelligence.
Beyond writing $50K–$250K checks in early-stage companies, we also plan to incubate startups in AI, XR, and consumer. We’re building Humans to be more than just a fund — we’re creating a launchpad for the next wave of transformative companies.
We look forward to partnering with outlier humans.