Karan Malhotra is Co-Founder and Head of Behavior at Nous Research, a pioneering open-source AI research company dedicated to building human-centric language models and decentralized AI infrastructure.

Karan studied Religion and Philosophy at Emory University and previously worked as a Machine Learning Researcher at the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab, bringing a unique interdisciplinary lens to AI behavior research.

Karan is the architect behind WorldSim, a groundbreaking base-model simulation prompting framework, and has been a key collaborator on the original Hermes fine-tune series built on synthetic GPT-4 data.

He co-founded Nous Research in 2023 alongside Jeffrey Quesnelle, Teknium, and Shivani Mitra, emerging from an open-source AI research community on Discord with a founding thesis of delivering world-class open-weights models to everyone.

Nous Research's flagship Hermes model has surpassed 50 million downloads, the company has raised over $145M including a $50M Series A led by Paradigm, and achieved a $1.5B valuation with its Psyche decentralized training network launching on Solana.