Nous Research, the innovative startup renowned for its open-source Hermes agent, is reportedly on the verge of closing a new funding round. This significant investment, which values the company at an impressive $1.5 billion, is being led by Robot Ventures, with substantial involvement from USV and other notable investors. According to three sources with direct knowledge of the deal, the company aims to secure at least $75 million, having attracted considerable interest from the investment community. This latest funding influx comes swiftly, less than three months after Nous Research successfully completed its $50 million Series A round.
Nous Research opted not to provide a comment on the development. Similarly, USV and Robot Ventures did not respond to inquiries for their input.
Established in 2023, Nous Research was co-founded by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra. Prior to this impending round, the company had successfully raised a cumulative total of $70 million in funding. Its previous investors include prominent names such as Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan, as detailed by Crunchbase.
Beyond its work on the Hermes agent, Nous Research also operates a decentralized network designed to facilitate hardware contributions for compute and training purposes. Furthermore, the company has launched specialized language models, particularly focusing on applications in coding and mathematics.
In the wake of Openclaw’s agent achieving viral status, Nous Research swiftly introduced its own competitive offering, Hermes. While OpenClaw operates locally on a PC to execute user tasks, Hermes distinguishes itself with built-in "skills" encompassing web search, coding, and image understanding. A pivotal feature of Hermes is its design to autonomously learn from user interactions, thereby developing additional capabilities without requiring manual intervention.
Mirroring the functionality of Openclaw, Hermes enables users to automate various tasks and engage directly with these agents, or receive messages from them, within popular platforms like Telegram and Discord. The increasing popularity of such tools stems from their ability to allow users to operate their AI agents remotely and continuously, offering unparalleled convenience.
As an open-source project that has achieved widespread adoption, Hermes has cultivated a substantial following on GitHub, evidenced by approximately 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks. Developers have the flexibility to deploy Hermes either on a desktop environment or via a virtual private server.
Additionally, Nous Research provides a cloud-hosted version of Hermes, which may appeal to users seeking a more streamlined experience without the need for local setup on their personal machines. This hosted service is accessible through various paid subscription tiers, ranging from $20 to $200 per month.
Sources indicate that the newly secured funding is earmarked to further enhance and expand both the Hermes product suite and the company's overarching business model.
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