AI Agent Startup Nous Research Nears $1.5 Billion Valuation in New Funding Round
Nous Research, the startup behind the widely popular open-source Hermes AI agent, is finalizing a new funding round that values the company at $1.5 billion. The round, raising at least $75 million, is led by Robot Ventures with significant participation from USV and other prominent investors. The company, founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra, has previously raised $70 million from backers including Paradigm and Balaji Srinivasan.
Hermes competes directly with other autonomous AI agents like OpenClaw by running tasks on behalf of users, but ships with built-in capabilities such as web search, coding, and image understanding. The agent automatically learns from user behavior and builds new skills without manual intervention. With roughly 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks on GitHub, Hermes has clearly captured developer attention, and users can run it locally on their own machines or through Nous Research's cloud-hosted version, which ranges from $20 to $200 per month.
The massive valuation reflects growing investor enthusiasm for AI agent technology that can operate around the clock across platforms like Telegram and Discord. Sources indicate the new capital will help Nous Research expand Hermes's product offerings and business model further. The company has also released specialized language models focused on coding and math, signaling ambitions beyond its flagship agent product.