Hello, everyone, and welcome to all newly joined subscribers!

This is the 106th edition of The Web3 + AI Daily - your definitive guide to the intersection of blockchain and AI. Investor appetite for blockchain-AI convergence kept climbing through October, prompting me to depart from my usual monthly schedule and publish this two-week overview instead.
We’re living through a pivotal moment. Anthropic gears up for a potential landmark IPO at valuations approaching $2 trillion, yet its enterprise buyers are diversifying into open-weight models and sovereign AI deployments. Investors appear to be hedging their positions by backing both sides of the divide - frontier labs and the open-source competitors gaining ground against them.
Who will prevail? It remains to be seen. However, the logic dictates that healthy financials and profitability will be the deciding factor.

Thank you for being here! Let’s dive in.

Web3 + AI Money Rounds

Nous Research Raises $90M to Bring Hermes Agent to Enterprises

Nous Research, the decentralized AI (dAI) company developing the most widely used open-source AI agent in the world, Hermes Agent, has raised $90M at $1.5B valuation. The Series B round was led by Robot Ventures, and supported by NVIDIA, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung Electronics, and 1789 Capital.

Popular among developers and individuals, the open source Hermes Agent has been cloned more than 24 million times, driving roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage, according to the startup’s estimates.
The capital will fund Nous Research’s push into the enterprise sector with “Hermes for Businesses,” allowing companies to deploy customized AI agents that can handle multi-step workflows while keeping their data private and secure.
Nous was at roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026 and expects to pass $100 million before the end of 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Nous Research has always been one of the most interesting projects in dAI, pushing the boundaries across novel model architectures, decentralized training, and open and transparent AI development. As Delphi Ventures‘ Tommy Shaughnessy Jr wrote:

The team has always been months to years ahead at every juncture. They did synthetic model evaluations years before people got sick of benchmark maxing, distributed training runs before it was interesting, YARN to massively increase context length back when you couldn’t dump endless text into LLMs and millions of downloads for their fine tuned Hermes Models. There were also a lot of fun projects along the way like WorldSim (massive world simulation) and FORGE.

Moreover, from day one, the company has built its mission around democratizing AI:

We formed Nous in 2023 to combat the seemingly inexorable trend dragging AI toward centralization and walled gardens. We believed the consequences of gate-kept access to the world’s most powerful technology would be borne by everyone, while the benefits would accrue to a few. We also believed that the very technology we were creating could empower everyone, leading to a flourishing of individuality. Today, we worry that the conversation is being dominated by fearmongering pleas for sweeping regulation, pleas that appear aligned with, if not motivated by, financial interests. This capital will go towards building the alternative: open, competitive, “safer” because of its auditability and not because of its gate-keepers.

While most rival agent frameworks, such as Meta‘s Muse and OpenAI‘s OpenClaw, remain under lab control, Hermes Agent is released under the MIT license, letting users retain full control over what they build with it.

The AI industry is shifting from renting intelligence to owning it - a trend that carries extra weight for enterprise clients. This $90M round signals that investors are tracking that transition closely.

If you're looking to build your own sovereign AI stack using Hermes Agent, I'd recommend you check out this blocmates. article:

Sui Foundation Injects $30M in The DATA Foundation

Sui Foundation has invested $30M in The DATA Foundation - the entity running the AI training data protocol DATA Network.

Under the partnership, DATA Network is set to be upgraded to run as a protocol natively on Sui [blockchain], and its independent chain will be retired. The existing DATA token will move to $Sui on a one-to-one basis. The existing DATA Network will continue to operate until the transition is completed, and the foundation said it will release a detailed timeline prior to the upgrade.
Walrus Foundation, meanwhile, will become the default storage layer for applications operated by DATA Foundation, which shifted its focus from general intellectual property infrastructure to AI training data in June.

Before pivoting to solving the copyright issues existing in AI training infrastructure, The DATA Foundation was called Story Protocol and focused on turning IP into a programmable and permissionlessly licensable asset.

Catalyst Closes $30M Seed Round to Boost Autonomous AI Trading

Catalyst Labs, an AI trading agents platform for crypto and financial markets, has closed a $30M Seed funding round led by $30M in a Seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital. Other participants included Jump Trading, PeakXV Ventures, Lux Capital, Anti Fund, Coinbase, Selini, SF1, and Premji Invest.

Catalyst researches your ideas, builds the optimal strategy, monitors events, and executes trades. Autonomously.

Antseed Raises $2.4M to Build the BitTorrent of AI Inference

AntSeed, a decentralized and peer-to-peer marketplace for AI inference, has attracted $2.4M in a token round led by Spark Capital. The funding round was backed by DCG, North Island Ventures, Reciprocal Ventures, Relayer Capital (acquired by RockawayX), Venice.ai, GenLayer‘s Albert Castellana Lluís, The Rollup‘s Andy Cavanaugh, Delphi Ventures‘ Yan Liberman, CFA, CAIA and Tommy Shaughnessy Jr, Drew Austin, and others.

Orbio Secures $1.2M to Let Agents Provision Their Own Compute

Orbio, another on-chain inference provider, has collected $1.2M to enable AI agents to pay for their own inference. The investors are yet to be announced.

So far, CREDIT [a utility token pegged to $1 of AI usage] has established the biggest foothold in tokenized inference.
Now we’re going deeper: turning CREDIT into the financial layer that powers AI infra at scale.

Thank you for reading! I hope you found this article insightful.
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The Web3 + AI Funding Bulletin | Mid-October…