Nous Research, the startup behind the open-source agent Hermes, is finalizing a new funding round led by Robot Ventures that values the company at $1.5 billion, according to three people familiar with the deal. The company is seeking to raise at least $75 million and reported strong investor interest.
This financing comes less than three months after Nous Research announced a $50 million Series A. Founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra, the company had raised roughly $70 million prior to this round from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan, per Crunchbase.
About Hermes and Nous Research
Hermes is an open-source agent project from Nous Research. It shipped with built-in “skills” such as web search, coding, and image understanding, and was designed to automatically learn from user interactions to develop additional capabilities without manual intervention. The project has attracted substantial attention on GitHub, with about 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks.
Developers can run Hermes locally on a desktop or on a virtual private server, and Nous Research also offers a cloud-hosted version for users who prefer a managed experience. The hosted tiers are available at paid levels ranging from $20 to $200 per month.
Beyond agent software, Nous Research is building a decentralized network to contribute hardware for compute and training, and it has released language models focused on coding and math.
Market context
Hermes was released weeks after OpenClaw, an agent that runs locally on PCs and performs tasks on behalf of users, went viral. Like OpenClaw, Hermes enables users to automate tasks and to interact with agents or receive messages from them through apps such as Telegram and Discord, allowing round-the-clock, remote operation.
Use of funds
Sources say the new funding will be used to expand Hermes products and the company’s business model. Nous Research declined to comment on the fundraising; USV and Robot Ventures did not respond to requests for comment.
