Nous Research is an AI company founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra, which TechCrunch describes as the maker of the Hermes family of open models and agent products (Source: techcrunch.com). On July 13, 2026, its talks to raise at least $75 million in new funding at a $1.5 billion valuation — led by Robot Ventures with Union Square Ventures participating — became public. The deal was still in talks at the time of reporting, and the figures rest on a single source.
Products
The Hermes agent is an open-source agent with built-in "skills" including web search, coding, and image understanding, and a capability to develop new skills automatically. It is offered as a desktop application and in cloud-hosted tiers priced from $20 to $200 per month, and its repository counted roughly 214,000 GitHub stars and nearly 40,000 forks as of July 2026. The company has also released language models focused on coding and math (Source: techcrunch.com).
Funding
Before the round under negotiation, Nous Research had raised a total of $70 million from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, Delphi Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan. TechCrunch reported the new raise is intended to "expand Hermes' products and business model further" (Source: techcrunch.com).
Snapshot
Valuation
| Date | Value | Notes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-07-13 (reported) | $1.5B (funding talks) | Raise of at least $75M under negotiation; led by Robot Ventures, with Union Square Ventures participating; not yet closed at time of reporting | (Source: techcrunch.com) |
Relationships
- related: Open-Weight Frontier Models — developer of open models
- related: Agentic AI — the Hermes agent product