Nous Research, the startup behind the open source Hermes agent, is finalizing a new funding round led by Robot Ventures at a valuation of $1.5 billion, with significant participation from USV and other prominent investors, according to three sources familiar with the deal. The company has raised at least $75 million and is receiving strong interest from investors, people said.
Nous Research declined to comment. USV and Robot Ventures did not respond to requests for comment.
The company was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra. Prior to this round, the company had raised a total of $70 million from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan, according to Crunchbase.
A few weeks after Openclaw's agent went viral, Nous Research released its own competitor called Hermes. OpenClaw is an agent that runs locally on your PC and can perform tasks on your behalf. One big difference is that Hermes includes built-in “skills” such as web searching, coding, and image understanding. Additionally, it is designed to automatically learn from how people use it and build more skills without manual intervention. Additionally, the startup has released language models focused on coding and mathematics.
Similar to Openclaw, users can automate tasks in Hermes, chat with these agents, and receive messages from them on apps like Telegram and Discord. These tools allow users to run AI agents remotely 24 hours a day and are becoming increasingly popular.
Widely adopted as open source, Hermes has amassed a huge following on GitHub, boasting approximately 214,000 stars and approximately 40,000 forks. Developers can run Hermes on their desktops or virtual private servers.
However, Nous Research also offers a cloud-hosted version, which some users may find easier to use, requiring no configuration on their machines. Hosted versions are available at different paid tiers ranging from $20 to $200 per month.
The new funding will help Hermès further expand its products and business model, the people said.
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