Nous Research, the open-source AI lab known for its Hermes family of agent models, is finalizing a new funding round of at least $75 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, according to reports from TechCrunch and The Block published July 13. The round is led by Robot Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures and other existing backers.

From open-weights lab to $1.5B agent company

Founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium and Shivani Mitra, Nous Research built its reputation on open-weight fine-tunes of frontier base models under the Hermes name, alongside Psyche, a decentralized training network that distributes model training across underutilized hardware rather than a single centralized GPU cluster. The company has previously raised roughly $70 million from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital and Balaji Srinivasan, and was valued at around $1 billion in its Series A. The new round would mark a roughly 50% step-up in valuation in about a year.

Hermes as an enterprise agent

Hermes has evolved from a fine-tuning project into a standalone agent runtime that Nous Research and its investors are pitching as production-ready for enterprise use, including customer-service escalation and operational workflows. The most recent release in the line, Hermes 4.3, was the first Hermes model trained on the Psyche decentralized network rather than a conventional centralized cluster, with a post-training corpus that expanded roughly 50x in token count compared with the prior Hermes 4 release, according to the model's release notes.

Why it matters

The round underscores that investors continue to reward open-weight, decentralized alternatives to the closed frontier labs, even as the broader agent market consolidates around a handful of large platform players. Nous Research's pitch — an open, community-auditable agent stack paired with a training network that doesn't depend on hyperscaler GPU allocations — gives it a distinct lane from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind's enterprise agent offerings, and the fresh capital suggests backers see room for that lane to scale into real enterprise deployments rather than remain a research curiosity.