{"slug": "hermes-agent-maker-nous-research-in-talks-for-new-funding-at-1-5b-valuation", "title": "Hermes agent maker Nous Research in talks for new funding at $1.5B valuation", "summary": "Nous Research, the startup behind the open-source Hermes agent, is finalizing a new funding round led by Robot Ventures at a $1.5 billion valuation, raising at least $75 million. The round comes less than three months after its $50 million Series A and will help expand Hermes products and business model.", "body_md": "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. The new round is coming less than three months after Nous announced its [$50 million Series A](https://siliconangle.com/2025/04/25/nous-research-raises-50m-decentralized-ai-training-led-paradigm/).\n\nNous Research declined to comment. USV and Robot Ventures didn’t respond to our request for comment.\n\nThe 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.\n\nBesides Hermes development, Nous Research has [a decentralize network](https://psyche.network/runs) to contribute hardware for compute and training. Plus, it has released language [models focused coding and math](https://nousresearch.com/releases).\n\nWeeks after [Openclaw’s agent](https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/27/everything-you-need-to-know-about-viral-personal-ai-assistant-clawdbot-now-moltbot/) 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,”](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/reference/skills-catalog) such as web search, coding and image understanding. Plus, it was designed to automatically learn from people’s usage and build more skills without any intervention required.\n\nJust 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.\n\nOpen-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](https://x.com/NousResearch/status/2061843507417944552?s=20) or on a virtual private server.\n\nBut Nous Research also offers a cloud-hosted [version](https://x.com/NousResearch/status/2074878754485043333), 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.\n\nSources say the new funding will help to expand Hermes products and business model further.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hermes-agent-maker-nous-research-in-talks-for-new-funding-at-1-5b-valuation", "canonical_source": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/hermes-agent-maker-nous-research-in-talks-for-new-funding-at-1-5b-valuation/", "published_at": "2026-07-13 23:31:18+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-13 23:48:06.889068+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-startups", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Nous Research", "Hermes", "Robot Ventures", "USV", "Paradigm", "OpenClaw", "Jeffrey Quesnelle", "Karan Malhotra"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hermes-agent-maker-nous-research-in-talks-for-new-funding-at-1-5b-valuation", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hermes-agent-maker-nous-research-in-talks-for-new-funding-at-1-5b-valuation.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hermes-agent-maker-nous-research-in-talks-for-new-funding-at-1-5b-valuation.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hermes-agent-maker-nous-research-in-talks-for-new-funding-at-1-5b-valuation.jsonld"}}