Nous Research eyes $1.5B valuation with new $75M round

The open-source AI scene is getting a serious capital injection. Nous Research, the outfit behind the Hermes AI agent, is finalizing a fresh funding round that values the company at a staggering $1.5 billion, according to three sources close to the deal. Robot Ventures is leading the charge, with heavy backing from Union Square Ventures and other marquee names. The startup is pulling in at least $75 million, and from the sound of it, they could have raised more — investor interest was reportedly intense.

Founded just last year by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra, Nous isn’t exactly new to big checks. They’d already banked $70 million from the likes of Paradigm, Balaji Srinivasan, and OSS Capital. But this round marks a dramatic leap in ambition. The catalyst is Hermes, their open-source competitor to the viral agent OpenClaw. Hermes didn’t just clone the playbook; it shipped with baked-in skills for web search, coding, and image understanding, and it’s designed to learn new tricks from how people actually use it, no manual intervention required.

The numbers on GitHub tell a story of their own: roughly 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks. Developers are clearly buying in, running the agent on desktops or virtual private servers. For those less inclined to fiddle with a command line, Nous offers a cloud-hosted tier, priced from $20 to $200 a month. That dual-track approach — raw, customizable code for devs and a polished hosted service for everyone else — is a classic land-grab strategy in the platform wars.

What’s the money for? Expanding Hermes’ product line and business model, sources say. The real question is whether Nous can convert that GitHub stardom into a sustainable revenue engine without alienating the open-source community that put them on the map. With $145 million in total funding now on the table, the pressure to build a real business, not just a beloved repo, just got a whole lot more concrete.