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Exclusive: Crypto VC giant Paradigm makes $50 million bet on decentralized AI startup Nous Research at $1 billion token valuation
The crypto industry has been fighting to get a piece of the red-hot artificial intelligence sector, but despite some hefty investments, blockchain companies have struggled to break through. That might finally be changing with Nous Research, a decentralized AI startup using the Solana blockchain as a key component in the process it uses to train its open-
After operating mostly under the radar for two years, Nous is bursting onto the scene with a $50 million Series A round, financed almost entirely by the crypto venture giant Paradigm, which confirmed the funding amount to Fortune.
The round values Nous at a token valuation of $1 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke with Fortune on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential fundraising details. Nous previously raised seed rounds totaling around $20 million from investors including Distributed Global, North Island Ventures, and Delphi Ventures.
While most projects at the intersection of blockchain and AI have come from crypto-focused startups and struggled to find traction, Nous was founded by a group of AI researchers who decided to use blockchain technology for its coordination and incentive capabilities. The company aims to develop its own open-source models that would compete with the likes of OpenAI and DeepSeek, though Nous is at a much earlier—and more experimental—stage. The other major difference is that Nous seeks to train its models not in a central data center, but in a completely distributed way, harnessing spare computing capacity from people around the world.
“We very much came from a mentality that we want to create and serve the world’s best AI,” said cofounder Karan Malhotra in an interview with Fortune.
Decentralized AI
Malhotra described Nous as an open-ers who met on social media and software platforms including Discord, GitHub, and Twitter. They started to tinker with existing AI large language models such as Meta’s Llama and Mistral to create their own versions, releasing a series of models under the name Hermes that gained popularity in the open-
They also began to release research papers around extending the memory of models, which have been cited by Meta and DeepSeek, as well as proposals for training models with GPUs, or graphics processing units, the kind of computer processors used for AI applications, that are not colocated. Nous collaborated with Diederik P. Kingma, a member of the OpenAI founding team, on the research.
Source: finance.yahoo.com