Nous Research nears $75M round at $1.5B valuation for Hermes

The open-source AI agent space just got a valuation marker to argue about. TechCrunch reports that Nous Research, the startup behind the Hermes agent, is finalizing a round of at least $75 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Robot Ventures with significant participation from USV. The reporting cites three sources with knowledge of the deal, and Nous, USV and Robot Ventures either declined to comment or did not respond. Take the specifics as reported, not as officially disclosed.

The interesting shape here is that Nous is being priced on a mix of open-source traction and a modest hosted business. Hermes has roughly 214,000 GitHub stars and nearly 40,000 forks, and the hosted version runs on paid tiers between $20 and $200 a month. The product ships with skills for web search, coding and image understanding, and it was designed to learn from people's usage and build more skills without manual intervention. Users chat with agents or receive messages from them in Telegram and Discord, which mirrors how Openclaw framed its own consumer surface when its agent went viral earlier this year.

That comparison is central to the story. Nous released Hermes weeks after Openclaw broke out, and TechCrunch describes them as direct competitors. The bet from Nous's investors is that an openly licensed agent, plus a decentralized network that lets contributors donate hardware for compute and training, plus in-house language models focused on coding and math, is a defensible package at $1.5 billion. Before this deal the company had raised a total of $70 million from Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital and Balaji Srinivasan, according to Crunchbase as cited by TechCrunch.

What the reporting does not give you is any revenue figure, hosted-tier subscriber count, or details on how the decentralized compute network is governed. It also does not disclose whether the round has formally closed. Robot Ventures leading a second round after backing the previous one reads either as high-conviction doubling down or as an existing investor bridging a company between milestones.

The forward-looking question is whether Nous can convert star counts into paid seats and enterprise contracts before the closed-source agent stacks lock down the same use cases. Sources told TechCrunch the new funding will 'help to expand Hermes products and business model further,' which is corporate for: they know the OSS-plus-thin-cloud shape has to grow real revenue if $1.5 billion is going to look cheap in twelve months.