Nous Research Is Raising $75 Million at a $1.5 Billion Valuation. Here Is What Its Hermes Agent Actually Does.

Key points

• Nous Research is finalising a funding round of at least $75 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, according to three sources familiar with the deal.
• The round is led by Robot Ventures, with significant participation from USV (Union Square Ventures), a well-known New York technology investment firm.
• The raise comes fewer than three months after Nous Research closed a $50 million Series A funding round.
• Before this new round, the company had raised a total of $70 million from investors including Paradigm and Balaji Srinivasan, according to Crunchbase.
• Hermes, Nous Research's flagship product, has collected roughly 214,000 stars on GitHub, a code-sharing platform where high numbers signal widespread developer use.

Nous Research was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium and Shivani Mitra. The company is now closing another cheque before the ink is dry on the last one, first reported by TechCrunch AI. That pace tells you something.

The centrepiece of their business is Hermes, an open-source AI agent. An AI agent is software that can carry out multi-step tasks on its own, without you clicking through every step yourself. Think of it as a digital assistant that keeps working after you close your laptop.

Hermes shipped with built-in skills: web search, writing code and understanding images. Crucially, it is designed to keep learning new skills from how you use it, without any extra setup on your part. You can automate tasks, then chat with Hermes or receive updates from it through apps like Telegram and Discord.

What does this mean for someone who might use it?

You have two realistic ways in. Developers can download Hermes and run it on a home computer or a rented online server. Everyone else can use the cloud-hosted version, which Nous Research runs for you, with paid tiers ranging from $20 to $200 a month. No technical setup required.

That $20 entry point puts it in the same neighbourhood as a Netflix subscription. Whether it is worth it depends entirely on how much you would actually hand off to an AI agent each week.

The new funding, sources say, will expand Hermes products and its business model. Beyond Hermes, Nous Research runs a decentralised network where people contribute computing hardware for AI training, and has released language models (the underlying text-processing technology inside tools like ChatGPT) focused on coding and maths.

Now, a word on the bigger picture. Nous Research is a real business with a real product and genuine community traction. But a $1.5 billion valuation for a company barely two years old is a bet on future growth, not present revenue. Investors are wagering that AI agents become a daily habit for millions of people. That may well happen. It has not happened yet.

Honest takeaway: If you are curious about AI agents, the $20-a-month hosted tier of Hermes is a low-risk way to test whether automating a real task in your life actually saves you time. Start with one task. If it does not stick after a month, cancel.