New Delphi pod with Tarun Chitra just dropped – founder of Gauntlet, managing partner at Robot Ventures. Robot just led the $90M round in $NOUS Research.
Tarun spent 3-4 months on diligence before backing Nous and Hermes Agent. He dug through OpenRouter data, GitHub forks, the whole stack.
Key takes from the pod:
• Why crypto's first AI wave was a disaster – meme coins with extra steps
• Why the teams that actually dropped tokens won
• OpenClaw has the worst dev experience he's used
• Hermes is closer to Ubuntu than Android – open infra play
• Chinese robot makers are already building on Hermes
• Some inference providers are gaming cache pricing
His market structure thesis: all the money flows to the top and bottom. Harnesses on top, inference underneath. Hermes is like investing in Phantom or FOMO – infra that captures real usage.
Microsoft and Nvidia joined the round. OpenRouter is basically a DEX for AI.
Delphi co-led the seed and doubled down in Series A and B. Full episode linked.
Tarun spent 3-4 months on diligence before backing Nous and Hermes Agent. He dug through OpenRouter data, GitHub forks, the whole stack.
Key takes from the pod:
• Why crypto's first AI wave was a disaster – meme coins with extra steps
• Why the teams that actually dropped tokens won
• OpenClaw has the worst dev experience he's used
• Hermes is closer to Ubuntu than Android – open infra play
• Chinese robot makers are already building on Hermes
• Some inference providers are gaming cache pricing
His market structure thesis: all the money flows to the top and bottom. Harnesses on top, inference underneath. Hermes is like investing in Phantom or FOMO – infra that captures real usage.
Microsoft and Nvidia joined the round. OpenRouter is basically a DEX for AI.
Delphi co-led the seed and doubled down in Series A and B. Full episode linked.