Nous Research is an open-source AI lab founded in 2023 that builds world-class open-weight language models - most notably its Hermes family - and decentralized infrastructure for training them. Its Psyche network coordinates heterogeneous GPUs across the internet via the Solana blockchain, offering a community-driven, transparent alternative to closed labs like OpenAI. Backed by Paradigm and others, the company positions open, unrestricted models as a counterweight to centralized AI.
Bespoke Labs is a Mountain View AI research lab that builds tools and datasets for training more reliable AI models and agents, starting with synthetic data curation and hallucination detection and expanding into realistic reinforcement-learning environments for long-horizon agentic AI. Its open-source projects, including Bespoke Curator, Bespoke-MiniCheck, OpenThoughts, Terminal-Bench, and GEPA, are widely used across the AI research community, and the company raised $40M in seed and Series A funding by mid-2026 from investors including Wing Venture Capital, 8VC, and Mayfield.