AI infrastructure raises while media trims engineering

Nous Research, the company behind the Hermes AI agent, is in talks to raise at least $75 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, according to TechCrunch. Robot is leading the round with participation from Union Square Ventures and other investors. The company builds tools that let software act with more autonomy, part of the current race to turn large language models into something that can execute tasks rather than just answer questions.

Meanwhile PixVerse, a Singapore-based video generation startup, closed a $439 million Series C extension that values the company north of $2 billion. The company reports 15 million monthly active users for its generative video platform. That user base, and the capital behind it, reflects continued investor appetite for consumer-facing AI products that can scale quickly and hold attention.

On the other side of the attention economy, Thomson Reuters announced it will cut a small number of engineering jobs. The Reuters report offered no headcount or timing detail, but the move follows a pattern across legacy information and media companies that are recalibrating technical teams in an environment where AI promises to automate portions of content production and software maintenance.

The contrast is clear: venture dollars are flowing toward companies building the new infrastructure of generative media, while established players that once employed large engineering staffs to manage databases and distribution are trimming. Stewards should watch whether the capital flowing into AI tooling translates into durable consumer behavior or whether these valuations rest on usage that has not yet proven sticky. The layoffs at Thomson Reuters are modest in scale but signal that even data incumbents are rethinking how much human engineering they need when the models can do more of the work.

The question is not whether AI is attracting capital—it clearly is. The question is whether the companies raising at billion-dollar valuations today will command the same premium when the novelty of generated video and autonomous agents becomes table stakes.