Laurent Sifre

LAURENT SIFRE

Co-founder & CTO
H Company
AI Deep Tech
2025 TOP 30 EMEA CTOs 2025

Career History

Laurent Sifre is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of H Company (known simply as H). Founded in 2023, the Paris-based startup develops advanced AI agents capable of reasoning, planning and executing multi-step tasks, with the goal of automating complex enterprise workflows and boosting organisational productivity. H raised a $220 million seed round in May 2024, an unusually large amount for this stage, backed by leading investors including Accel and Creandum. Sifre sets the company’s technical vision and leads the development of its core AI systems.

Before starting H Company, Sifre spent nearly a decade at DeepMind as a Principal Scientist, where he contributed to some of the lab’s most celebrated projects. These included AlphaGo, which defeated world champions at the game of Go, AlphaFold, which made breakthroughs in predicting protein structures, and AlphaStar, which brought reinforcement learning into the complex real-time strategy game StarCraft II. He later turned his focus to scaling large language models.

Earlier in his career, Sifre co-founded CamTrackr, a mobile app for augmented videos, where he led development across iOS and Mac apps, and cloud backend. He also completed internships at Google Brain, working on large-scale image recognition, and at Sony, where he developed climate prediction software. He holds dual Master’s degrees in engineering from École des Ponts et Chaussées and École Polytechnique, and a PhD in Applied Mathematics from École Polytechnique.

About H Company

Founded in 2023, H Company (originally Holistic AI) quickly established itself as one of Europe’s most ambitious AI startups. Its focus is on building “action-oriented” AI agents designed to automate multi-step tasks and increase productivity for both businesses and individuals.

The company made headlines in 2024 when it closed Europe’s largest AI seed round at the time, attracting investors such as Accel, Creandum, Amazon and Samsung. This was achieved before H had launched a product. By the end of that same year, H Company released Runner H, its first general-purpose AI agent capable of executing complex instructions through natural language.

Since then, H Company has broadened its portfolio with three new agentic models and additional products. These include Surfer H, an open-source web-native agent, and Tester H, an AI tool designed to streamline software testing.

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