Nous Research seeks new funding at a reported $1.5B valuation

In short: TechCrunch reports that Nous Research is in talks to raise at least $75 million in new funding at a valuation of about $1.5 billion.

What happened

Nous Research is a startup that builds Hermes, an “AI agent” that can do tasks for you on a computer. An AI agent is like a digital helper that can follow steps, not just answer questions.

According to TechCrunch, the new funding round is being led by Robot Ventures, with significant participation from USV and other investors. The reported valuation is $1.5 billion, which is an estimate of what investors think the whole company is worth.

The funding talks come less than three months after Nous announced a $50 million Series A round, TechCrunch said. The company was founded in 2023, and it has raised $70 million total before this reported round, according to Crunchbase.

Hermes is “open source,” meaning its code is publicly shared so others can use it and build on it, like sharing a recipe instead of keeping it secret. TechCrunch says Hermes is widely used, with roughly 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks on GitHub, which is a popular site where people share and collaborate on code.

Users can run Hermes on their own computer, or on a rented server online. Nous also offers a hosted version with paid plans ranging from $20 to $200 per month, according to TechCrunch.

Why it matters

Funding is a sign that investors believe more people will use tools like Hermes to automate everyday work, such as searching the web or writing code. For regular users, it could mean more options between AI tools you run yourself and simpler paid versions that work out of the box.

Source: TechCrunch AI