Hermes agent maker Nous Research in talks for new funding at $1.5B valuation

2026-07-13 · Source: AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch · Field: Technology & Digital — Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Entrepreneurship & Start-ups, Robotics & Autonomous Systems · Depth: Fundamental Awareness, quick

Summary

Nous Research, the startup behind the open-source Hermes agent, is reportedly finalizing a new funding round at a \$1.5 billion valuation, aiming to raise at least \$75 million. The round is led by Robot Ventures, with participation from USV and other investors. Founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra, the company previously secured \$70 million. Nous Research developed Hermes as a competitor to Openclaw's agent, offering built-in skills like web search, coding, and image understanding, and designed to automatically learn new capabilities. Hermes, which runs locally on PCs or VPS, has gained significant traction with 214,000 GitHub stars and nearly 40,000 forks. The company also provides a cloud-hosted version with paid tiers from \$20-\$200 monthly and has released language models for coding and math. The new capital is expected to fuel further expansion of Hermes' products and business model.

Key takeaway

For investors evaluating the AI agent market, Nous Research's \$1.5 billion valuation and substantial funding round underscore strong confidence in open-source, skill-based AI agents. This signals a maturing segment where user adoption, evidenced by Hermes' 214,000 GitHub stars, translates into significant market value. You should consider the dual strategy of local and cloud-hosted offerings as a key differentiator for broad market penetration and revenue generation in this space.

Key insights

Open-source AI agents with built-in skills and learning capabilities attract significant investment and user adoption.

Principles

• Local execution and cloud options broaden agent accessibility.
• Automatic skill learning enhances agent utility.
• Open-source models foster rapid community adoption.

In practice

• Deploy Hermes on desktop or virtual private server.
• Utilize Hermes' web search and coding skills for automation.
• Explore cloud-hosted agent versions for simplified setup.

Topics

• AI Agents
• Open-source Software
• Nous Research
• Hermes Agent
• Venture Capital Funding
• Large Language Models

Best for: AI Product Manager, Investor, Entrepreneur, Director of AI/ML

Related on AIssential

• Hermes Agent Just Became the Most-Used AI Agent in the World — A self-improving open-source agent rapidly achieved top performance and adoption on a global platform.
• Parallel Web Systems hits $2B valuation five months after its last big raise — Rapid investor confidence in AI agent-tooling startups can lead to significant valuation growth.
• 😸 OpenAI may give Uncle Sam 5% — OpenAI's proposed government stake sparks debate on public AI wealth distribution, while AI agents evolve towards autonomous executive assistants.
• Connect Grok Build xAI with Hermes Agent (Nous Research): A Practical Guide — Integrating Hermes Agent with Grok Build streamlines ML and coding workflows by resolving common setup and data sharing issues.
• AI agent startup Lyzr reportedly raising $100M at $500M valuation — Lyzr's platform streamlines AI agent development and deployment, enabling rapid creation and automation for enterprises.
• I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit — Frontier AI labs have found product-market fit for coding agents, driving significant enterprise revenue through aggressive pricing.

See Counsel's argued verdicts on the open AI decisions leaders are weighing →

Open in AIssential →

Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch.