Observed Signal · Jul 13, 2026 · Funding · Source: techcrunch · Impact: 2/5 · Sentiment: Neutral
Nous Research Nears $75M Funding at $1.5B Valuation
Nous Research, developer of the open-source Hermes Agent, has raised $90 million in a Series B round at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Robot Ventures with participation from Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung, 1789 Capital, and Microsoft's M12. This follows a $50 million Series A announced under three months prior, bringing total funding to approximately $158-160 million. Founded in 2023, the company plans to use the funds to scale its open-core model, offering paid enterprise services like hosting, security, and support through 'Hermes for Businesses.' Hermes, which can browse the web, edit files, write code, and learn new skills, has been cloned over 24 million times (or downloaded over 22.7 million since February) and accounts for about 2.5% of global AI token usage. The company reports roughly $36 million in annualized revenue as of mid-September, projecting over $100 million by year-end. It competes with OpenClaw, Cognition, and Replit.
Significant funding and $1.5B valuation for an open-source AI agent startup could influence agent tooling, hosting and developer ecosystems, but the news is primarily startup funding rather than an immediate, industry-wide AdTech shift.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- Nous Research raised $90 million in Series B funding at a $1.5 billion valuation.
- The round was led by Robot Ventures with participation from Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung, 1789 Capital, and Microsoft's M12.
- The company plans to launch 'Hermes for Businesses' to offer paid enterprise services while keeping the core software free.
- Hermes has been cloned over 24 million times (or downloaded over 22.7 million since February) and accounts for about 2.5% of global AI token usage.
- Annualized revenue reached $36 million in mid-September, with a projection of over $100 million by year-end.
Connected Companies & Entities
14 Entities mapped“Before this round, it had raised a total of $70 million in funding from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures,...”
“Open-source and widely adopted, Hermes has amassed a massive following on GitHub, boasting roughly 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks....”
“Replit: The coding start-up raised $400 million in March at a $9 billion valuation....”
“Cognition: The maker of the coding agent Devin raised more than $1 billion in May at a valuation of $26 billion....”
“The round was led by Robot Ventures, with participation from other backers including Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung,...”
“Microsoft’s venture arm M12...”
“The round was led by Robot Ventures, with participation from other backers including Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung,...”
“Just like Openclaw, users can automate tasks with Hermes and chat with these agents or receive messages from them in apps like Telegram and ...”
“The round was led by Robot Ventures, with participation from other backers including Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung,...”
“Nous Research, the startup behind the open-source Hermes agent, is finalizing a new round of funding led by Robot Ventures, with significant...”
“Just like Openclaw, users can automate tasks with Hermes and chat with these agents or receive messages from them in apps like Telegram and ...”
“OpenClaw was created by the Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, who has since joined OpenAI....”
“Mistral AI: The French A.I. champion also relies on open models and is expanding its agent offerings for businesses....”
“Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch....”
Ontology Mapping & Concepts
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Hermes Agent: Open‑Source Autonomous AI Agent
Hermes Agent is an open-source autonomous AI agent project by Nous Research, launched in early 2026. It implements a continuous "agent loop" (goal understanding, dynamic planning, tool orchestration, execution, observation, and refinement) and emphasizes model-agnostic operation, multi-platform gateways, and local execution. Hermes ships with 68 built-in tools, runs on 18+ platforms, and can autonomously generate reusable "Skills" (stored under ~/.hermes/skills) as part of a closed self-improvement loop. The project has gained significant community traction on GitHub and is positioned as an open agentic ecosystem enabling developers to build autonomous workflows while raising safety, reliability, and observability challenges.
Nebius Stock Surges After Ex‑OpenAI Fund Discloses Stake
Nebius, a Dutch AI cloud provider spun out of Yandex that supplies GPUs for training AI models, saw its U.S.-listed shares jump after Situational Awareness — a hedge fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner — disclosed a 12.4 million Class A share holding (about 5.6% of the company) in a filing published Wednesday. Nebius rose roughly 11% in premarket trading and is up 149% year-to-date. The company has recently secured major strategic deals, including a March agreement with Meta to provide $12 billion of dedicated capacity (and up to $15 billion additional capacity over five years) and a $2 billion investment and collaboration with Nvidia announced the same month. Situational Awareness is described as managing billions and investing in physical AI infrastructure.
HermesCloud: Hosted Hermes Agent Private Beta
A Dev.to post (published 2026-05-09) announces HermesCloud, a managed hosting service for the open-source Hermes Agent. HermesCloud offers private, pre-provisioned workspaces with persistent memory, preloaded skills, scheduled jobs (cron), and pre-wired gateways for Telegram, Slack and web. The service supports model choice and BYOK for providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and OpenRouter, and handles updates, backups and orchestration to remove self-hosting operational overhead. The landing site uses Next.js 16 on Vercel and the offering is in a limited private beta with founding-user pricing and an email-based waitlist at hermes-cloud.vercel.app. The project is explicitly not affiliated with Nous Research and is positioned as a hosted layer on top of the existing Hermes Agent open-source project.
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