OpenClaw Rival Hermes, made by Nous Research, in Talks to Raise at $1.5 Billion Valuation

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US startup Nous Research, the company behind the open-source agent Hermes, is currently negotiating a new funding round at a valuation of $1.5 billion. That’s according to TechCrunch, citing three sources familiar with the deal. The round is set to be led by Robot Ventures, with significant participation from Union Square Ventures (USV) and other prominent investors. The company is looking to raise at least $75 million — and investor interest is said to have been high, according to the report. Nous Research declined to comment on the information when contacted by TechCrunch.

Hermes is considered a direct rival to OpenClaw, the AI agent that went viral earlier this year and runs locally on users’ own machines to carry out tasks on their behalf. Just a few weeks after the OpenClaw hype, Nous Research launched its own agent — with some notable differences in approach.

Who Is Behind Nous Research

Nous Research was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra. Before the current round, the startup had raised a total of $70 million, according to Crunchbase, from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital, and investor Balaji Srinivasan. The company is well established in the open-source community: alongside the Hermes agent, Nous Research has also released its own language models focused on coding and math.

The project’s traction is reflected in its GitHub numbers: Hermes has already racked up roughly 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks on the platform.

What Hermes Can Do

Nous Research markets Hermes as “The Agent That Grows With You.” Here’s an overview of its key capabilities:

• Task automation: Like OpenClaw, Hermes can perform tasks on behalf of users — with agents running around the clock if desired. Recurring jobs such as reports, backups, or briefings can be scheduled using natural language and then run unattended.
• Built-in “skills”: Unlike OpenClaw, Hermes shipped from day one with ready-made capabilities, including web search, coding, and image understanding. On top of that come browser automation, image generation, text-to-speech, and multi-model reasoning — i.e., combining several AI models.
• Persistent memory and autonomous learning: The agent permanently remembers projects and solutions it has found once, and is designed to automatically generate new skills from usage patterns — without manual intervention.
• Messaging integration: One agent, one memory, many surfaces: users can reach Hermes via Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, email, and the command line.
• Subagents: For larger tasks, Hermes can spin up isolated subagents with their own conversations, terminals, and Python scripts, delegating work to them.
• Sandboxing: For safe experimentation, Hermes supports five isolated environments — local, Docker, SSH, Singularity, and Modal — including container hardening.
• Flexible deployment: Hermes is open source (MIT license) and runs as a native app on macOS, Windows, and Linux, as a terminal application, or on a virtual private server (VPS).
• Cloud version: Those who want to skip setting things up themselves can opt for a hosted version, with paid tiers ranging from $20 to $200 per month. Via the “Nous Portal,” the subscription plans (Free, Plus, Super, Ultra) include monthly credits and access to more than 300 AI models.

According to TechCrunch’s sources, the fresh capital is intended to further expand the product and business model around Hermes.