Union Square Ventures (USV)

Nous Research Nears $75M Funding at $1.5B Valuation

Nous Research, the open-source creator of the Hermes agent, is finalizing a new funding round led by Robot Ventures with significant participation from USV, valuing the company at $1.5 billion. The startup is raising at least $75 million, less than three months after announcing a $50 million Series A. Founded in 2023, Nous previously raised about $70 million from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital and Balaji Srinivasan (per Crunchbase). The company develops the Hermes agent, runs a decentralized network for contributing hardware for compute and training, and offers both downloadable and cloud-hosted versions of its agent with paid tiers.

New York Tech Week: a16z Speedrun Takeaways

New York Tech Week drew ~50,000 attendees across 1,500+ events. a16z speedrun staff hosted events and collected observations about local AI adoption, creator monetization, and founder-focused programming. Speakers and attendees noted a cultural difference between San Francisco and New York in AI adoption (NYC trailing SF by several months, with enterprise users adopting tools like Claude Code/Cowork while SF users move faster to Codex). The week featured founder-centric events (blind pitches, pop-ups, hackathons), a strong showing from creator/media-focused sessions where Substack was frequently cited as a preferred creator platform, and student hackathons (the “vibe code & tea” event received 1.1k requests; 224 accepted; 143 participants built apps). The Tech Week team is preparing editions in SF and LA in October.

Suno Raises $400M Series D Amid Copyright Lawsuits

Suno, an AI music-generation company, raised $400 million in a Series D round that values the business at $5.4 billion. The financing, led by Bond Capital with participation from IVP, Forerunner, Union Square Ventures, Alkeon, Quiet and returning investors including Matrix, Lightspeed, Menlo Ventures and Schroders Capital, comes despite ongoing copyright litigation. Major labels Universal Music Group and Sony (and German collection society GEMA) are suing Suno over its training data; the labels recently moved to amend complaints to allege more than 61,000 additional copyrighted songs were used. Warner Music Group settled previously and reached a licensing deal. Suno continues to report heavy user activity and App Store chart success.