companies

Nous Research

Open-source AI lab behind the Hermes model family and the Psyche decentralized training network, run by a small, internet-native research team.

Nous Research grew out of an informal Discord- and Twitter-based collective of AI researchers experimenting with fine-tunes of Meta's early LLaMA models, formalizing into a company in 2023 under co-founders Jeffrey Quesnelle, Ryan Teknium, Karan Malhotra, and Shivani Mitra. The team built a following in the open-source AI community through the Hermes line of fine-tuned and later fully custom-trained models, prized for following instructions with less of the corporate hedging seen in some closed-lab chat models. Its more technically ambitious project is Psyche, a training network built on Nous's own DisTrO optimizer that allows large models to be pretrained across geographically distributed hardware connected over the ordinary internet rather than a single co-located GPU cluster, with training runs coordinated and verified using Solana blockchain consensus. Hermes 4.3, released in 2025, was the first production Hermes model post-trained entirely on Psyche. Nous raised a $50 million Series A in April 2025 led by Paradigm, and as of mid-2026 was reportedly in talks for a new round at a $1.5 billion valuation led by Robot Ventures, alongside investors including USV, North Island Ventures and OSS Capital.

Founded

2023

Headquarters

San Francisco, United States

Sector

lab