reasoning-models
(6)
Nous Research
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.
Kanjun Qiu
Kanjun Qiu is the co-founder and CEO of Imbue, a San Francisco AI research lab building agents that reason and code while keeping humans at the helm. A CS grad from MIT who once funded her studies writing high-frequency trading algorithms, she was Dropbox's first chief of staff, co-founded the ML recruiting startup Sourceress, and now runs a lab that raised over $200M (Series B, backers including Nvidia) at a valuation north of $1 billion. She's also a general partner at Outset Capital, a Sequoia Scout, and co-author of Sew Electric, a book that teaches kids computer science through sewing.
Drishan Arora
Drishan Arora is the co-founder and CEO of Deep Cogito, a San Francisco AI lab building toward general superintelligence through openly released reasoning models. A former senior engineer at Google who led large language model work for its generative search, Arora left to chase a contrarian bet: that intelligence improves not by searching harder but by building better intuition. His team trained the Cogito family of hybrid reasoning models - which can answer instantly or stop to think - in roughly 75 days, then scaled to a 671-billion-parameter model his company calls the strongest open-weight LLM from a US firm. The method underneath it all, iterated distillation and amplification, lets the models internalize their own reasoning paths and self-improve.
Zyphra
Zyphra is a superintelligence research and product company building efficient, open foundation models and a full-stack AI cloud. Best known for its SSM-hybrid Zamba models, the ZAYA1 reasoning family trained entirely on AMD hardware, and the Zonos text-to-speech system, Zyphra argues that frontier intelligence should run cheaply, locally, and outside the walled gardens of a handful of labs. In June 2025 it raised a $100M Series A at a $1B valuation led by Jaan Tallinn.
Imbue
Imbue is a San Francisco AI research lab building agents that can reason and code. Founded in 2021 as Generally Intelligent and renamed in 2023, the company is led by CEO Kanjun Qiu and CTO Josh Albrecht. After a $200M Series B that valued it above $1B, Imbue is focused on practical agent tools - most visibly Sculptor, a UI for running parallel coding agents safely in containers - guided by a mission to keep humans in control of powerful AI.
Actively AI
Actively AI is a New York-based enterprise software company building Intelligence-Led Revenue: custom reasoning models and Per-Account AI agents that work 24/7 to research accounts, identify high-value opportunities, and guide go-to-market teams on the next best move. Founded in 2022 by Stanford AI researchers Mihir Garimella and Anshul Gupta, it pitches a sharper alternative to the 'spray and pray' automation of earlier AI sales tools, and counts Samsara, Ramp, Ironclad, Attentive, and Verkada among its customers.