A Record Round, Then an Exodus
H Company, a Paris-based AI startup previously known as Holistic, raised a 220 million dollar seed round on May 21, 2024, at the time the largest seed round any European AI company had closed. The plan was to build foundation models in the same league as OpenAI, Mistral, and Aleph Alpha. The round drew backers who rarely appear on the same term sheet: Bpifrance, the French state's own investment arm, alongside Eric Schmidt, Amazon, Xavier Niel, and Samsung.
Three months later, before H Company had shipped a public product, three of its five founders quit. Karl Tuyls, Daan Wierstra, and Julien Perolat left in August 2024, citing operational differences, according to Sifted's original reporting. All three had come from Google DeepMind, the same background as the CTO who remained.
Where the Departed Founders Landed
Karl Tuyls resurfaced at Meta, reported in February 2025. That detail matters more than a routine hire: a founder who left a company explicitly built to keep European AI talent inside Europe took his next job at one of the American hyperscalers that funding round was implicitly positioned against.
H Company itself continued operating with its two remaining technical leaders, chief executive Charles Kantor and chief technology officer Laurent Sifre, and later released its first models under the brand Holo.
The Second Departure to a US Giant
On September 4, 2026, German trade outlet IT-Boltwise and Sifted both reported that Sifre is leaving H Company for Microsoft. He was the company's CTO and, alongside Kantor, one of only two people left from the original five-person founding team after the 2024 exodus.
With Sifre gone, Charles Kantor is the sole remaining member of that founding group. Two of the four ex-DeepMind scientists who started the company, Tuyls and now Sifre, have each ended up at a large US technology company: the first at Meta, the second at Microsoft.
What a Record Round Actually Bought
A 220 million dollar seed round, part-funded by a state investment vehicle, is a capital outcome. Keeping the scientists that capital was raised around is a separate, harder problem, and H Company's history over roughly twenty-eight months shows the two do not automatically travel together.
For any investor or policymaker treating a large funding announcement as proof of European AI sovereignty, H Company's founder roster is the check to run before declaring the point made: money in the door says nothing about who is still in the building two years later.
The Timeline in One Table
The sequence from launch to a founding team of one runs faster than the round's headlines suggested at the time.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| May 21, 2024 | 220 million dollar seed round closes, then Europe's largest for an AI startup |
| August 24, 2024 | Three of five founders (Tuyls, Wierstra, Perolat) leave over operational differences |
| February 2025 | Karl Tuyls confirmed to have joined Meta |
| September 4, 2026 | CTO Laurent Sifre confirmed leaving for Microsoft |
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