Nous Research, the startup behind open source agent Hermes, is finalizing a new funding round led by Robot Ventures, with significant participation from USV and other prominent investors at a valuation of $1.5 billion, according to three sources with knowledge of the deal. The company is raising at least $75 million and has drawn a high level of interest from investors, according to the people. The new round comes less than three months after Nous announced its $50 million Series A.

Nous Research declined to comment. USV and Robot Ventures did not respond to our request for comment.

The company was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, Shivani Mitra. Prior to this round, it had raised a total of $70 million in funding from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital and Balaji Srinivasan, according to Crunchbase.

In addition to the development of Hermes, Nous Research has a decentralized network to provide hardware for computing and training. Additionally, it has released language models focused on coding and mathematics.

Weeks after the Openclaw agent went viral, Nous Research launched its own competitor called Hermes. OpenClaw is an agent that runs locally on a PC and can perform tasks on behalf of the user. A key difference is that Hermes shipped with built-in “skills” such as web searching, coding, and image understanding. Additionally, it was designed to automatically learn from people’s usage and develop more skills without the need for any intervention.

Like Openclaw, users can automate tasks with Hermes and chat with these agents or receive messages from them on apps like Telegram and Discord. These tools have become increasingly popular because they allow users to run their AI agents remotely and 24 hours a day.

Open source and widely adopted, Hermes has amassed a large following on GitHub, with approximately 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks. Developers can run Hermes on a desktop or virtual private server.

But Nous Research also offers a cloud-hosted version, which some users may find easier to use, avoiding any configuration on their own machines. The hosted version is available through several paid tiers ranging from $20 to $200 per month.

Sources say the new financing will help further expand Hermes’ products and business model.