Nous Research is finalizing a new round of funding led by Robot Ventures, with significant participation from USV and other prominent investors, valuing the company at $1.5 billion. The company is raising at least $75 million and, according to people familiar with the deal, fielded a high level of investor interest. It’s a steep jump from the $70 million the company had raised in total before this round, from backers including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan.
Nous Research was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra. Its flagship product, Hermes, entered the market shortly after OpenClaw popularized the idea of a personal AI agent that runs locally on a PC and acts on a user’s behalf. Hermes differentiates itself with built-in “skills” — web search, coding, and image understanding among them — and is designed to automatically learn new capabilities from how people use it, rather than needing manual updates. Users can run it on a desktop or a VPS, chat with it directly, or receive messages from it inside apps like Telegram and Discord.
Why it matters
Hermes has become one of the most widely adopted open-source AI agent projects, with roughly 214,000 GitHub stars and nearly 40,000 forks — real evidence that a well-executed open alternative to a hot proprietary category (personal AI agents) can build a comparably large following. For founders weighing whether to build on top of a closed agent platform or an open one they can inspect and self-host, Nous Research’s ability to raise a $75M Series B on the strength of that open-source adoption is a signal that investors see a viable, fundable business model behind “open and self-hostable,” not just behind closed, metered APIs. The company also offers a hosted version on paid tiers from $20 to $200 a month, giving it a monetization path that doesn’t depend on every user self-hosting.