Nous Research, a startup founded in 2023 by four researchers, is in talks for a new funding round of at least $75 million — at a $1.5 billion valuation. Robot Ventures is set to lead the round, with significant participation from Union Square Ventures and other investors. TechCrunch reported the deal citing three sources with direct knowledge. Nous Research, Robot Ventures, and USV all declined to comment or did not respond to requests.
Key takeaways
- Round of at least $75M at a $1.5B valuation
- Lead investor: Robot Ventures, with significant USV participation
- Prior funding: $70M total from Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan
- Hermes Agent: ~214,000 GitHub stars, ~40,000 forks?fork: A personal copy of a GitHub repository, used to develop a project independently of the original.
- Cloud version priced at $20–$200/month depending on tier
Who is Nous Research, and what is Hermes?
Nous Research was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra. Beyond language models focused on coding and math, the company launched its own AI agent called Hermes in early 2026 — a direct response to the viral success of OpenClaw, which had gained traction weeks earlier as a locally-running PC agent.
Hermes stood out from the start for three reasons. First, it shipped with a built-in set of skills — web search, coding, image understanding — without requiring manual setup. Second, it was designed to learn from user interactions and automatically build new skills without developer intervention. Third, Hermes enables users to automate tasks and communicate through apps like Telegram and Discord, meaning the agent can run in the background around the clock.
The project quickly gained massive traction in the open-source?open-source: Software whose source code is publicly available for anyone to inspect and build on. community. On GitHub it accumulated over 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks. Developers can run Hermes locally on a desktop or on a virtual private server. Nous Research also offers a self-hosted cloud version with paid tiers ranging from $20 to $200 per month.
Low revenue, high valuation — what are investors betting on?
A $1.5 billion valuation is striking for a startup with no disclosed revenue. The personal and developer AI agent market is one of the hottest segments in 2026. Open-source projects with massive developer adoption — like Hermes with its 214,000 stars — attract capital not for today's revenue, but for potential dominance in agentic infrastructure. Robot Ventures, known for early bets on open-source AI projects, taking the lead here signals a clear thesis: this is an infrastructure bet, not a product bet.
Paradigm, one of the earlier investors, is known for very early positions in projects that define new categories. Union Square Ventures' participation adds distribution network and industry credibility. Together, these funds suggest conviction: Nous Research has a shot at defining what AI agents look like in local infrastructure and open-source environments.
AI agents as a new software category
OpenAI offers ChatGPT Work and cloud-based agents. Anthropic distributes Claude through its API. But a growing number of developers are looking for solutions that give them control — without routing data through external servers, running locally or within their own infrastructure.
Hermes targets this segment directly. The ability to run an agent on your own server, no mandatory prompt transfer to someone else's cloud, and an open-source codebase — these are concrete arguments for environments where privacy and data sovereignty matter. According to data cited by TechCrunch, open-source models accounted for 29% of all traffic routed through Vercel's AI gateway in June 2026.
Why this matters
A $1.5 billion valuation for a startup that has raised just $70 million and discloses no revenue says something important about where AI is heading. The market is no longer betting only on large labs selling model access through APIs — it's betting on agentic infrastructure that lets companies and developers retain control over their data. Hermes, with its open-source code, massive developer base, and architecture enabling local operation, is precisely that kind of bet. This isn't a competition over whose model is smarter — it's a competition over who defines agentic software for companies that don't want the "everything in the vendor's cloud" model.
What's next
- The new round is intended to expand Hermes' products and business model — no specific roadmap was disclosed, but prior expansion included a cloud-hosted model and coding/math-focused models
- Worth watching: whether Nous Research moves toward enterprise commercialization or continues expanding its consumer/prosumer offering
- Robot Ventures and USV will likely expect concrete revenue growth metrics within 12–18 months, given the high valuation multiple
