Hermes agent maker Nous Research is in talks for new funding at a $1.5 billion valuation

Nous Research, the startup behind the Hermes open source proxy, is finalizing a new round of funding led by Robot Ventures, with significant participation from USV and other prominent investors at a valuation of $1.5 billion, according to three sources familiar with the deal. The company is raising at least $75 million and has received a high level of interest from investors, according to the people. The new round comes less than three months after Al Nous announced it $50 million Series A.

Nous Research declined to comment. USV and Robot Ventures did not respond to our request for comment.

The company was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnel, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Ticknum, and Shivani Mitra. Prior to 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.

In addition to developing Hermes, Nous Research Decentralized network To contribute hardware for computing and training. In addition, it has released the language Models focusing on coding and mathematics.

Weeks later Openclaw proxy After it went viral, Nous Research released its own competitor called Hermes. OpenClaw is an agent that runs locally on the computer and can perform tasks on behalf of the user. One major difference is that Hermes is shipped with… Built-in “skills.” Such as web searching, coding, and image understanding. Additionally, it is designed to automatically learn from people’s use and build more skills without requiring any intervention.

Just 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 are becoming increasingly popular because they allow users to operate their own AI agents remotely and around the clock.

Open source and widely adopted, Hermes has gained a huge following on GitHub, boasting nearly 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks. Developers can run Hermes on a file Desktop Or on a virtual private server.

But Nous Research also offers a cloud-hosted service versionwhich some users may find easier to use, avoiding any setup on their own devices. The hosted version is available across different paid tiers ranging from $20 to $200 per month.

Sources say the new funding will help expand Hermes’ products and business model further.