Nous Research, the open-source AI lab behind the Hermes agent, is finalising a new funding round of at least $75 million led by Robot Ventures at a $1.5 billion valuation, according to reporting by TechCrunch on July 13, 2026. Union Square Ventures (USV) is joining alongside other prominent investors.
From Open-Source Models To A Live Agent Business
Nous Research was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium and Shivani Mitra and had previously raised roughly $70 million from Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital and angel investor Balaji Srinivasan. The New York-based lab is positioned as a leader of the American open-source AI movement, with a focus on model architecture, data synthesis, fine-tuning and reasoning.
Why Hermes Is Hitting A Nerve
Hermes is Nous's answer to OpenClaw and other viral personal agents. Unlike single-purpose chatbots, Hermes ships with built-in skills — web search, coding, image understanding — and is designed to automatically learn new skills from user behaviour. Developers can run it locally on a desktop or on a virtual private server. Nous also sells a cloud-hosted version priced $20 to $200 per month, and integrates with Telegram and Discord so agents can run around the clock. The project has amassed roughly 214,000 GitHub stars and nearly 40,000 forks.
The Bigger Picture For AI Agents
The round arrives at a moment of frenzied capital deployment into agentic AI. Investors are betting that open-source infrastructure — rather than closed foundation models alone — will define how enterprises and developers build agents that carry out multi-step work autonomously.
Related coverage on The Robotics Media: Together AI Raises $800M Series C Led by Aramco Ventures, Ant Group Open-Sources SingGuard-NSFA To Lock Down Autonomous AI Agents, and Anthropic Extends Free Claude Fable 5 Access Again As OpenAI's Sol Ships.
Reporting based on coverage from TechCrunch, The Block and Nous Research.