Nous Research, maker of Hermes agent, in talks to raise at least $75M at $1.5B valuation

Nous Research, the company behind the open-source Hermes agent, is in advanced talks to raise at least $75 million in a new funding round that values the startup at $1.5 billion, according to three sources cited by TechCrunch.

The round is led by Robot Ventures with significant participation from USV and other prominent investors, the report states. Nous Research declined to comment, and USV and Robot Ventures did not respond to requests for comment.

Before this round, Nous Research had raised a total of $70 million from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan, according to Crunchbase data referenced by TechCrunch.

Hermes is an open-source agent that ships with built-in skills such as web search, coding, and image understanding, and is designed to automatically learn from usage to build additional skills without manual intervention.

Users can automate tasks with Hermes and interact with it or receive messages via apps like Telegram and Discord, and the agent can run locally on a desktop or a virtual private server.

Nous Research also offers a cloud-hosted version of Hermes with paid tiers ranging from $20 to $200 per month, providing a more user-friendly option for those who prefer not to self-host.

The company was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra, and its Hermes agent has amassed roughly 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks on GitHub.

The new funding is expected to help expand Hermes’ products and business model, including both cloud-hosted and local deployment options.