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April 25, 2025 – Nous Research, a decentralized AI collective building open-source large language models (LLMs) and infrastructure, today announced a $50 million Series A funding round led by Paradigm, at a $1 billion token valuation. This significant investment follows previous seed rounds totaling approximately $20 million from investors including Distributed Global, North Island Ventures, and Delphi Digital. This brings the total funding raised to date to over $70 million, including a $5.2M seed round in January 2024 and a $14.8M seed round in January 2025.
Nous Research is developing open-source, human-centric language models and simulators, challenging the traditional closed-model approach. The company leverages the Solana blockchain to coordinate global compute resources for distributed training, enabling it to tap into a vast network of both industrial and consumer-grade GPUs. This decentralized approach aims to democratize access to advanced AI capabilities while fostering transparency and community ownership.
The new funding will primarily be used to expand computational capacity and further research efforts. Nous Research is focusing on key areas like model architecture, data synthesis, fine-tuning, and reasoning, all with the goal of aligning AI systems with real-world user experiences. The company's flagship model, Hermes 3, built upon LLaMA and Mistral architectures, showcases its commitment to developing high-performing, open-source alternatives.
“We believe the future of AI lies at the intersection of open-source development and the crypto ethos,” said Karan Malhotra, Co-founder of Nous Research. “Our goal is to build the best AI for the world—transparent, equitable, and community-owned.”
By integrating blockchain technology, Nous Research ensures transparency and incentivizes participation while mitigating against data poisoning. The blockchain acts as a secure and verifiable layer, transforming contributions from voluntary efforts into valuable transactions, leveraging Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) for robust security.
Nous Research's distributed training system, deployed on the Solana blockchain, benefits from the network's high performance and low transaction fees. While a formal launch date is yet to be announced, the team is actively developing its platform and exploring tokenomics, considering both a native token and potentially utilizing SOL for rewards.
About Nous Research:
Nous Research is a decentralized AI collective building open-source LLMs and infrastructure through distributed training. Leveraging the Solana blockchain, Nous develops human-centric models like Hermes 3, pioneering methods for decentralized GPU training and resilience against data poisoning. Learn more at https://nousresearch.com/.
Compiled by CMO Intern team
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