Jeffrey Quesnelle is Co-Founder and CTO of Nous Research, an open-source AI research lab developing human-centric language models and the Hermes AI agent, now valued at $1.5 billion.

Jeffrey earned an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan-Dearborn and a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Oakland University, before spending nearly two decades at Intrepid Control Systems rising to Director of Software Development and later serving as a Principal Engineer at Eden Network.

Jeffrey is a published AI researcher and co-author of YaRN (ICLR 2024), a breakthrough method for extending large language models' context windows at a fraction of the usual cost, and DeMo (ICLR 2026), a decoupled momentum optimization technique.

Prior to Nous Research, Jeffrey advanced software engineering for autonomous vehicles at Intrepid Control Systems and built decentralized MEV protocols at Eden Network, giving him a rare cross-disciplinary foundation in automotive systems, cryptography, and AI.

Nous Research has raised $158 million in total funding including a $90 million Series B backed by NVIDIA, Microsoft M12, Samsung, and Y Combinator; the open-source Hermes Agent has been cloned over 24 million times, driving roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage.