Nous Research, the startup behind the open-source Hermes AI agent, is finalizing a funding round of at least $75 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. According to TechCrunch, the round is led by Robot Ventures, with significant participation from Union Square Ventures and other investors. Three sources with knowledge of the deal confirmed the terms, though Nous Research declined to comment, and neither Robot Ventures nor USV responded to requests for comment.
The company was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra. Before this new round, Nous Research had raised a total of $70 million from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan, according to Crunchbase. The new capital is expected to go toward expanding Hermes’ products and business model.
The raise puts Nous Research firmly in the upper tier of open-source AI startups, a space that has attracted enormous investor attention over the past two years as the industry debates whether closed or open models will ultimately win out.
Hermes entered the market shortly after Openclaw’s AI agent went viral. Openclaw runs locally on a PC and can carry out tasks on a user’s behalf. Nous Research released Hermes as a direct competitor, but with a few important differences. Hermes shipped with built-in skills out of the box, including web search, coding, and image understanding. It was also designed to learn from user behavior over time and build new skills automatically, without anyone having to configure it manually. On top of that, Nous Research has released separate language models focused specifically on coding and math.
Like Openclaw, Hermes lets users automate tasks and chat with agents through apps like Telegram and Discord. That kind of remote, always-on access has made these tools genuinely popular. People want their AI agents working in the background around the clock, not just when they have a browser tab open.
The open-source version of Hermes has built a large developer following. It has around 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks on GitHub, which puts it among the more widely adopted agent projects on the platform. Developers can run it on a desktop machine or on a virtual private server.
Nous Research also offers a cloud-hosted version for users who do not want to handle setup themselves. That hosted product is available across several paid tiers:
- Entry-level access starting at $20 per month
- Higher tiers scaling up to $200 per month
- A more user-friendly experience with no local configuration required
The valuation reflects how much the AI agent market has shifted in a short time. A year ago, most agent products were experimental. Now they are attracting serious venture capital, enterprise interest, and a growing base of everyday users who want software that can act on their behalf. Nous Research sits at a useful intersection: open-source credibility with developers, a hosted product for less technical users, and a model that keeps improving without requiring constant manual updates. That combination is what investors appear to be betting on.
