Nous Research raising $75M at $1.5B valuation

Nous Research is finalizing a funding round of at least $75 million led by Robot Ventures at a $1.5 billion valuation, according to people familiar with the talks. USV is among the participating investors and the round attracted interest from other backers. The valuation would be more than double the company's level roughly a year ago. Before the current raise the startup had received about $70 million in prior financing. That total included a $50 million Series A led by Paradigm that valued a yet-to-launch token at $1 billion. Nous Research was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium and Shivani Mitra. The lab is known for Hermes, an open-source agent designed to run on users' machines or in the cloud to perform tasks such as web search, coding assistance and image understanding. Hermes was released weeks after a rival agent drew broad attention and was built to learn from usage and develop new skills over time. The project has attracted a large developer following on GitHub, with roughly 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks, according to people familiar with the project. Users can run Hermes locally on a desktop or a virtual private server, or subscribe to a cloud-hosted service with tiers reported to range from $20 to $200 per month. Integrations let agents exchange messages and automate tasks through platforms such as Telegram and Discord, and tools exist to keep agents running continuously on remote servers. Participants in the discussions indicate the new capital will be used to expand Hermes' product set and refine the company's business model, including support and hosting options for individual users and for enterprises. The funding is intended to help scale both the open-source community and paid services. To date backers include Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital and Balaji Srinivasan.