Nous Research Nears New Funding at $1.5B Valuation as Open-Source Agent Hermes Gains Traction

Nous Research, the startup behind the open-source Hermes AI agent, is finalizing a new funding round led by Robot Ventures with participation from USV and other prominent investors, according to three sources with knowledge of the deal. The company is raising at least $75 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, just three months after announcing a $50 million Series A. Nous Research declined to comment, and USV and Robot Ventures did not respond to requests for comment.

Founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra, Nous Research had raised a total of $70 million prior to this round from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan. The company develops open-source language models focused on coding and math, and maintains a decentralized network for contributing hardware for compute and training.

Hermes, the company's flagship agent, competes directly with OpenClaw, which went viral earlier this year. While both allow users to automate tasks and run AI agents remotely, Hermes ships with built-in "skills" such as web search, coding, and image understanding, and is designed to automatically learn from usage to build new skills without manual intervention. Users can interact with Hermes via chat or through apps like Telegram and Discord.

The open-source agent has amassed over 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks on GitHub. Developers can run it on a desktop or virtual private server, while a cloud-hosted version is available at paid tiers ranging from $20 to $200 per month. Sources say the new funding will help expand Hermes products and its business model further.