According to insiders, Nous Research, the startup behind the open-source AI agent "Hermes," is nearing completion of its latest funding round. Led by Robot Ventures with participation from well-known firms such as USV, the company’s valuation has reached $1.5 billion. The raise amounts to at least $75 million and benefited from oversubscription by investors. Founded in 2023, Nous Research was established by founders including Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra. Prior to this round, it had raised an aggregate of $70 million from investors such as Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan. The company's open-source project, Hermes, is an AI agent capable of local deployment and autonomous task execution. Compared to competitors, Hermes comes pre-equipped with skills like web search, coding, and image understanding. It can automatically learn from user data and independently develop new skills without human intervention. Developers may choose to run it on desktops or virtual private servers (VPS) themselves, or opt for cloud-hosted versions priced between $20 and $200 per month. On GitHub, Hermes has garnered approximately 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks, reflecting extremely active community engagement. Insiders stated that the fresh capital will be used to expand Hermes’ product line and business models.