Nous Research, the brains behind the open-source Hermes agent, is reportedly closing in on a fresh funding round led by Robot Ventures, with USV and other big-name investors tagging along, at a valuation of $1.5 billion. Three people in the know say the startup is raising at least $75 million, and apparently had to beat investors off with a stick. Nous declined to comment, while USV and Robot Ventures played hard to get.

The company was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra. Before this round, it had already scooped up $70 million from the likes of Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan, per Crunchbase.

Weeks after OpenClaw's agent went viral, Nous fired back with Hermes, its own competitor. Unlike OpenClaw, which runs locally on a PC, Hermes ships with built-in “skills” like web search, coding, and image understanding, and it learns from users automatically to build more skills without manual intervention. Because who has time to teach their AI? The startup has also released language models focused on coding and math, because those are definitely the only things that matter.

Like OpenClaw, users can automate tasks with Hermes and chat with it in apps like Telegram and Discord. These tools have become wildly popular for running AI agents remotely and 24/7, because your AI should never sleep.

Hermes has amassed a massive following on GitHub with roughly 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks. Developers can run it on a desktop or a virtual private server. But for those allergic to setup, Nous offers a cloud-hosted version with paid tiers from $20 to $200 a month. Because nothing says “open source” like a subscription fee.

Sources say the new funding will help expand Hermes’ products and business model further. Translation: more skills, more servers, more money.