Nous Research in talks for $75M round
Nous Research, maker of the open-source Hermes agent, is reportedly in talks to raise $75M+ led by Robot Ventures at a $1.5B valuation. Nothing is signed yet.
Nous Research, the lab behind the open-source Hermes agent, is in talks for a new funding round that would value the company at $1.5 billion, TechCrunch reported on July 13, citing three people familiar with the deal. The report describes Robot Ventures as leading the round, with Union Square Ventures also participating, and puts the raise at $75 million or more. Nothing is signed: Nous Research declined to comment, and neither Robot Ventures nor USV responded to requests for comment, so the numbers could still move before any close.
The company traces to a 2023 founding, with Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra listed as co-founders, and has raised roughly $70 million to date. That total includes a Series A led by Paradigm, with OSS Capital, North Island Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan, and Robot Ventures also chipping in. Its main product, Hermes, is an open-source AI agent with built-in web search, coding, and image-understanding skills. The code has drawn more than 214,000 GitHub stars, and the company also sells a cloud-hosted version on paid tiers running $20 to $200 a month.
What it means for you
What’s confirmed is the business underneath the rumor: an open-source agent with real developer traction and a paying hosted tier, a more durable setup than most AI labs that started in Nous’s crypto-adjacent circles. If you already run Hermes Agent, the funding talk says more about investor appetite for open agent tooling than about anything changing in the product today.