Nous Research

Nous Research emerged in 2022 as a group of volunteers who met on social media and software platforms including Discord, GitHub and Twitter. The group began by experimenting with existing large language models such as MetaMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry’s Llama and Mistral, and released a series of models under the Hermes name that became popular in the open-source community.⁠[1]

The company was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Teknium and Shivani Mitra. As of April 2025, Quesnelle was chief executive officer, Malhotra was head of behavior and Teknium was head of post-training.⁠[2][3]

The company says it was founded to counter the trend toward centralized AI and “walled gardens.” Its early work included post-training Meta’s Llama models for “user-alignment,” so that models follow the individual user’s worldview rather than one imposed by a company, and publishing YaRN, a method for extending context windows at lower added cost.⁠[4]

In January 2024 Nous Research closed a $5.2 million seed round led by Distributed Global and OSS Capital, with participation from Balaji SrinivasanBalaji SrinivasanBalaji Srinivasan is an entrepreneur, investor and the author of The Network State, the founder of Network School, and a former chief technology officer of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded Counsyl and 21, along with its successor product Earn.com, was involved in projects such as Coin Center, and has backed companies such as fomo as an angel investor.Open the full entry. A further $15 million, including a previously unannounced round in June 2024, brought the company’s total seed funding to about $20 million; other backers included Delphi Ventures, North Island Ventures and Solana co-founder Raj GokalRaj GokalRaj Gokal is a co-founder of Solana, president of Solana Labs, and a director of the Solana Foundation. Early on he worked in financial investing and digital health ventures, co-founded Sano, and served as director of product at Omada Health. He is mainly involved in Solana’s business, organizational, and product development, and as an angel investor he has also backed startups such as fomo.Open the full entry.⁠[2]

On August 15, 2024, Ryan Teknium, Jeffrey Quesnelle and Chen Guang submitted the “Hermes 3 Technical Report” to arXiv, describing Hermes 3, a neutrally aligned, general-purpose instruction-tuned model with tool-use capabilities. The authors state that its largest version, Hermes 3 405B, leads open-weight models on several public benchmarks.⁠[5]

On November 8, 2024, Nous Research launched the Forge Reasoning API Beta and Nous Chat. Nous Chat is a free chat platform for the Hermes 3 70B model, with threaded conversations and configurable system prompts. The Forge Reasoning API pairs a language model with a code interpreter and reasoning methods including Monte Carlo Tree Search, Chain of Code and Mixture of Agents, and supports Hermes 3, Claude Sonnet 3.5, Gemini and GPT-4; the beta initially opened to a select group of users, used LambdaLambdaLambda is an American AI cloud computing company founded in 2012 by Stephen Balaban and Michael Balaban. It initially sold GPU workstations and servers for deep learning, later shifted to renting out cloud computing capacity based on Nvidia GPUs, and builds supercomputers and “AI factories” for AI training and inference.Open the full entry as its compute partner and was limited to single-turn interactions.⁠[6]

In April 2025 Nous Research raised a $50 million Series A led by ParadigmParadigmParadigm is a technology investment firm founded in 2018 by Matt Huang and Fred Ehrsam, investing in crypto assets, artificial intelligence, robotics, and other emerging technologies at stages extending from initial funding to public markets. The firm also conducts protocol research, open-source software development, and company incubation.Open the full entry, which provided almost all of the funding. Tommy Shaughnessy of Delphi Ventures, an earlier investor, said the round valued Nous’s not-yet-launched token at $1 billion. The capital was earmarked for research and development, foundational compute infrastructure for Psyche, engineering hires and new models.⁠[2][1]

Karan Malhotra said the founders were “crypto native” but had initially been cautious about blockchain until their distributed-training research made it necessary. He said: “this is really the only way in which we can make such a massive training run and such a democratic thing possible.”⁠[2][1]

The same day, Nous announced the testnet of the Psyche Network, an open infrastructure built on SolanaSolanaSolana is a proof-of-stake (PoS) public blockchain designed for high throughput and low latency, with SOL as its native token; it was developed by Solana Labs and launched Mainnet Beta in March 2020. It is known for design choices such as its Proof of History clock and parallel execution, suffered several network-wide outages in its early years, and became one of the crypto industry’s focal points in events including the FTX collapse, U.S. SEC lawsuits, and the listing of Solana ETFs.Open the full entry that connects diverse GPU hardware to train censorship-resistant models in a fault-tolerant way.⁠[2]

On May 14, 2025, Nous published the architecture of the Psyche Network. Psyche decentralizes training across underutilized hardware and uses the DisTrO family of optimizers, whose predecessor is DeMo, to reduce data transfer by several orders of magnitude; coordination happens on the Solana blockchain, with an on-chain smart contract acting as the coordinator that tracks run state and participants. Nous also described verifying that participants trained honestly as an open problem.⁠[7]

The first training run on Psyche, named Consilience, was set to pretrain a 40-billion-parameter dense model with the Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) architecture on 20 trillion tokens drawn from FineWeb, a filtered FineWeb-2 and The Stack V2. Nous described it as the largest pretraining run conducted over the internet to date.⁠[7]

On August 26, 2025, Nous Research released the Hermes 4 Technical Report together with three models: Hermes-4-Llama-3.1-405B, Hermes-4-Llama-3.1-70B and Hermes-4-14B.⁠[8]

In December 2025 Nous released Hermes 4.3, a 36-billion-parameter model based on ByteDance’s Seed-OSS-36B-Base, describing it as its first production model post-trained entirely on the Psyche Network, with training context lengths of up to 512K tokens. The Psyche run averaged 144,000 tokens per second across 24 nodes, and Nous said the Psyche-trained version outperformed a traditionally centralized version on a suite of downstream tasks.⁠[9]

Nous released Nomos 1 on December 9, 2025, and NousCoder-14B on January 6, 2026.⁠[8]

On February 25, 2026, Nous Research released Hermes Agent, an open-source agent, under the MIT license. Hermes Agent has a built-in learning loop that creates and refines skills as it is used and builds a model of the user across sessions; it runs in the terminal, as a desktop app and in the cloud, and is powered by Nous Portal.⁠[8][10][4]

Hermes Agent ships with built-in skills such as web search, coding and image understanding, and users can chat with it or receive messages from it in apps such as Telegram and Discord. It can run on a desktop computer or a virtual private server; as of July 2026, Nous also offered a cloud-hosted version with paid tiers from $20 to $200 per month.⁠[3]

As of November 4, 2026, the NousResearch/hermes-agent repository on GitHub showed about 260,000 stars and about 57,300 forks. In October 2026 the company said Hermes had been cloned more than 24 million times and, by its internal estimates, drove about 2.5% of global token usage.⁠[11][4]

In October 2026 Nous Research announced that it had raised $90 million from investors including NVIDIANVIDIANVIDIA is an American semiconductor and computing technology company that provides graphics processing units, artificial intelligence infrastructure, networking interconnects, and computing software, and is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker NVDA.Open the full entry, MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry’s M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Menlo Ventures. The announcement, signed by chief executive officer Dillon Rolnick, said the capital would go toward building an open, competitive alternative and toward Hermes for Businesses, developed with new partners to let companies own and improve their AI stacks, choose cost-effective models and keep their usage private.⁠[4]

Nous Research: Official website: https://nousresearch.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]

X: Public account: https://x.com/NousResearch (opens in a new window).⁠[10]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://youtube.com/@NousResearch (opens in a new window).⁠[10]