New Delphi Podcast with Tarun Chitra (@tarunchitra), founder of Gauntlet and managing partner at Robot Ventures Robot just led the $90M round in @NousResearch. Tarun spent three to four months on diligence, from OpenRouter data to GitHub forks, before backing Nous and Hermes Agent We get into why crypto's first run at AI went wrong, why the crypto people who dropped the token won, why OpenClaw is the worst developer experience he's used, and why Hermes is closer to Ubuntu than to Android He also found Chinese robot makers building on Hermes, and some inference providers gaming cache pricing His market structure take: all the money goes to the top and the bottom. Harnesses on top, inference underneath. Hermes is like investing in Phantom or FOMO 00:00 Intro 06:34 Robot Leads Nous's $90M Round 09:37 Crypto AI Was Meme Coins With More Steps 14:40 Why Nous Stood Out Early 28:14 Hermes vs OpenClaw 35:39 The End of AI Lock-In 46:33 The Ubuntu of AI 56:17 Microsoft and Nvidia Join the Round 59:42 OpenRouter Is a DEX for AI 1:07:02 All the Money Goes to the Top Disc. Delphi Ventures co-led the seed of Nous Research and invested again in the Series A and B Full episode