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

_Monday, July 13, 2026 at 8:01 PM EDT · Capital, AI · Latest · Tier 2 — Notable_

![Nous Research Said to Be Raising at $1.5 Billion Valuation Led by Robot Ventures — Primary](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/GjsjauvbsAAgUtD.jpeg?w=900)

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.

## Sources

- [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/hermes-agent-maker-nous-research-in-talks-for-new-funding-at-1-5b-valuation/)

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Retrieved: 2026-07-14T03:12:42.236Z
Publisher: Tech & Business (techandbusiness.org)