Nous Research Is Raising $75 Million at a $1.5 Billion Valuation. Here Is What Its Hermes Agent Actually Does.
The startup behind the open-source Hermes AI agent is closing a new funding round just three months after its last one. If you have never heard of Hermes, you are about to.
Key points
- Nous Research is finalising a funding round of at least $75 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, according to three sources familiar with the deal.
- Robot Ventures is leading the round, with significant participation from USV (Union Square Ventures), a New York technology investment firm.
- The raise comes fewer than three months after Nous Research closed a $50 million Series A.
- Before this round, the company had raised a total of $70 million from investors including Paradigm and Balaji Srinivasan, according to Crunchbase.
- Hermes, Nous Research's flagship product, has roughly 214,000 stars on GitHub, a code-sharing platform where high numbers signal widespread developer use.
Nous Research was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium and Shivani Mitra. The company's closing another cheque before the ink is dry on the last one, first reported by TechCrunch AI. That pace tells you something.
We covered the broader open-source AI surge when half the Fortune 500 moved onto open models on 13 July, which is the context that makes Nous Research's momentum make sense.
The centrepiece of their business is Hermes, an open-source AI agent: software that carries out multi-step tasks on its own, without you clicking through every step. Think of it as a digital assistant that keeps working after you close your laptop.
Hermes shipped with built-in skills including web search, coding and image understanding. It's also designed to keep learning new skills from how you use it, without extra setup. Users can automate tasks and chat with Hermes or receive updates through apps like Telegram and Discord.
What does this mean for someone who might use it?
There are two realistic ways in. Developers can download Hermes and run it on a home computer or a rented online server. Everyone else can use the cloud-hosted version Nous Research runs, with paid tiers from $20 to $200 a month. No technical setup required.
That $20 entry point sits in the same neighbourhood as a Netflix subscription. Whether it's worth it depends entirely on how much you'd actually hand off to an AI agent each week.
The new funding, sources say, will expand Hermes products and its business model. Beyond Hermes, Nous Research runs a decentralised network where people contribute computing hardware for AI training, and has released language models (the underlying text-processing technology inside tools like ChatGPT) focused on coding and maths.
Nous Research is a real business with real community traction: 214,000 GitHub stars and nearly 40,000 forks aren't marketing. But a $1.5 billion valuation for a company barely two years old is a bet on future growth, not present revenue. Investors are wagering that AI agents become a daily habit for millions of people. That may well happen. It hasn't happened yet.
Honest takeaway: If you're curious about AI agents, the $20-a-month hosted tier of Hermes is a low-risk way to test whether automating a real task in your life actually saves you time. Start with one task. If it doesn't stick after a month, cancel.
