Nous Research is finalizing a funding round of at least $75 million that values the artificial intelligence startup at approximately $1.5 billion, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The financing is being led by Robot Ventures, with significant participation from Union Square Ventures (USV) and other investors, the sources said. They added that the round attracted strong interest from investors.
Nous Research declined to comment on the fundraising. Robot Ventures and USV did not respond to requests for comment.
Hermes Platform Draws Developer Interest
Founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium and Shivani Mitra, Nous Research develops open-source AI models and autonomous agent technology. According to Crunchbase, the company had previously raised about $70 million from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital and Balaji Srinivasan.
The startup gained attention after launching Hermes, an open-source AI agent positioned as a competitor to OpenClaw. The software enables users to automate digital tasks while interacting with AI agents through desktop environments and messaging platforms such as Telegram and Discord.
Unlike some competing agents, Hermes includes built-in capabilities for web search, coding and image understanding. It is also designed to improve over time by learning from user interactions and expanding its range of skills with minimal manual intervention. The company has also introduced specialized language models focused on coding and mathematics.
Hermes has built a large developer community since its release. Its open-source repository has accumulated roughly 214,000 GitHub stars and nearly 40,000 forks, reflecting broad adoption among developers. The software can be deployed on personal computers or virtual private servers.
For users seeking a managed service, Nous Research also offers a cloud-hosted version of Hermes through subscription plans ranging from $20 to $200 per month, providing an alternative to self-managed installations.
According to the sources, the fresh capital will be used to further develop the Hermes platform, expand the company’s product portfolio and strengthen its commercial business model.
Source: TechCrunch