Nous Research, the startup behind open-source agent Hermes, is closing a new round of funding led by Robot Ventures, with significant participation from USV and other prominent investors at a $1.5 billion valuation, according to three sources with knowledge of the deal. The company is raising at least $75 million and has shown a high level of interest from investors, according to the people.
Nous Research declined to comment. USV and Robot Ventures did not respond to our request for comment.
The company was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, Shivani Mitra. Prior to this round, it had raised a total of $70 million in funding from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital and Balaji Srinivasan, according to Crunchbase.
Weeks after the Openclaw agent went viral, Nous Research released its own competitor called Hermes. OpenClaw is an agent that runs locally on a computer and can perform tasks on behalf of the user. A key difference is that Hermes ships with built-in “skills”, such as searching the web, coding and understanding images. Additionally, it was designed to automatically learn from human use and build more skills without manual intervention. Additionally, the startup has released the language models that focus on coding and math.
Just like Openclaw, users can automate tasks with Hermes and chat with or receive messages from these agents on apps like Telegram and Discord. These tools have become increasingly popular as they allow users to run AI agents remotely and around the clock.
Open source and widely adopted, Hermes has amassed a huge following on GitHub, with around 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks. Developers can run Hermes on a desktop or on a virtual private server.
But Nous Research also offers a cloud hosting versionwhich some users may find more user-friendly, avoiding any setup on their own machines. The hosted version is available through various paid tiers ranging from $20-$200 per month.
Sources say the new funding will help further expand Hermes’ products and business model.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
