Human API Exits Stealth With $65M Funding to Power AI-Human Collaboration
- Human API lets AI agents directly hire people for real-world tasks, coordinating workflows and paying through Stripe.
- Platform targets tasks difficult for automation, like nuanced audio interpretation, creating scalable cross-border income streams for human contributors.
Human API has launched its own platform that allows AI agents to hire humans for concrete tasks. The company describes the service as the first arrangement in which software agents assign work directly to people for smoother project management and data collection. The service comes from Eclipse, the team behind an Ethereum L2 powered by the Solana Virtual Machine. Human API supplies infrastructure so agents coordinate with people directly, closing the long-discussed “last mile” gap where digital systems struggle with interactions tied to physical activity. Agents can handle vast volumes of digital work yet still rely on people for judgment, local presence, and sensory input. Human API aims to bridge human dependence in many cases, giving AI systems a structured route to request human help for real-world work and receive results at scale. Human Workflows For Agent Requests Human API presents itself as a coordination and execution system designed first for agents. After opening an account, human contributors can browse available tasks, accept assignments, and submit requested work such as audio recordings. Each submission enters review, and approved contributions receive payment through Stripe Connect. For AI agents and client firms, the system creates a direct automatic route to human-generated data in large volumes. Organizers avoid manual hiring rounds for every small assignment, while agents call on a standing pool of workers who complete short jobs under predefined guidelines. Developers argue that agents often encounter jobs easy for people yet hard or uneconomical for machines. Tasks such as interpreting spoken language, capturing subtle accents, or rating nuanced audio fall into a gap where Human API channels work with contributors who can respond quickly. While still in stealth mode, Human API helped assemble a studio-quality audio set for a leading frontier AI lab. To support the plan, Human API has raised $65 million from Placeholder, Hack, Polychain, DBA, and Delphi Ventures. Funding supports a vision where AI agents no longer sit on the edge of human centered systems but share spaces in which people earn alongside software. New Market For Human Skills Supporters see Human API formalizing how agents and people share work, framing the service as a marketplace where skills hard to automate gain new income streams across borders. AI firms, on the other side, gain consistent access to data sources feeding training and evaluation. Sydney Huang, the founder of HumanAPI and CEO of Eclipse, said:
“Agents can do anything they put their collective minds to, but they run into a brick wall the moment they’re assigned a task whose endpoint surfaces in the physical world,”
Public debate around human hire services for AI agents has already grown noisy, with Moltbook and RentAHuman drawing heated reactions across Hacker News, Reddit tech circles, and X.