Nous Research Said to Be Raising at $1.5 Billion Valuation Led by Robot Ventures

Nous Research, the startup behind the open-source Hermes AI agent, is finalizing a new funding round led by Robot Ventures with significant participation from Union Square Ventures and other investors at a $1.5 billion valuation, according to three people familiar with the deal. The company is raising at least $75 million, and the round attracted high investor interest, the sources said. The round comes less than three months after Nous announced a $50 million Series A. Founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra, the company had previously raised $70 million from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan, according to Crunchbase. Beyond the Hermes agent, Nous operates a decentralized network for contributed compute and has released language models focused on coding and mathematics. Hermes ships with built-in skills such as web search, coding, and image understanding, and is designed to automatically learn from user interactions and add new capabilities without intervention. The open-source project has accumulated roughly 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks on GitHub. Nous Research, Union Square Ventures, and Robot Ventures declined to comment.