Nous Research in talks for new funding at $1.5B valuation

Nous Research, the startup behind the open-source Hermes agent, is finalizing 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 fielded a high level of interest from investors, according to the people. Nous Research declined to comment.

USV and Robot Ventures didn’t respond to our request for comment. The company was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, Shivani Mitra. Before 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 Openclaw’s agent went viral, Nous Research released its own competitor called Hermes. OpenClaw is an agent that runs locally on a PC and can perform tasks on behalf of the user. One key difference is that Hermes shipped with built-in “skills,” such as web search, coding and image understanding.

Hermes was designed to automatically learn from people’s usage and build more skills without manual intervention. The startup has released language models focused on coding and math. Just like Openclaw, users can automate tasks with Hermes and chat with these agents or receive messages from them in apps like Telegram and Discord.

These tools have become increasingly popular as they allow users to run their AI agents remotely and around the clock. Open-source and widely adopted, Hermes has amassed a massive following on GitHub, boasting roughly 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-hosted version, which some users may find to be more user-friendly, avoiding any setting up on their own machines. The hosted version is available via various paid tiers ranging from $20-$200 a month. Sources say the new funding will help to expand Hermes’ products and business model further.

The success of Nous Research and its Hermes agent has significant implications for the AI industry. As autonomous agents become increasingly popular, companies like Nous Research are poised to play a major role in shaping the future of AI-powered automation. The new funding will likely enable Nous Research to further develop its products and business model, potentially leading to even more innovative applications of AI.