510 million! Hermes developer revealed new financing, valuation reaches tens of billions

Compiled by Zhidongzhi | Edited by Eggplant | Cheng Qian Zhidongzhi reported on July 15 that on July 13, foreign media TechCrunch quoted people familiar with the matter as reporting that Nous Research, an American open source AI unicorn that became popular with the popular Hermes Agent, is advancing a new round of financing of at least US$75 million (approximately RMB 510 million). If the transaction is successfully completed, its valuation is expected to reach US$1.5 billion (approximately RMB 10.2 billion). TechCrunch cited people familiar with the matter as saying that Nous Research’s current round of financing is expected to be led by Robot Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures (USV) and other investment institutions. The transaction is still in the advancement stage, and the financing scale, valuation and investors may change. Nous Research declined to respond to foreign media comments, and Robot Ventures and USV did not respond to requests for comment as of TechCrunch's press time. Hermes Agent is one of Nous Research's most representative products. According to data from the OpenRouter platform on May 9, Hermes Agent’s single-day token consumption reached 271 billion, ranking first, surpassing competing products such as OpenClaw. Hermes Agent has the capabilities of local operation, task automation and long-term memory. Users can call the AI ​​Agent through applications such as the instant messaging tool Telegram and the developer community platform Discord to complete tasks such as web search, code generation and image understanding. Founded in 2023, Nous Research is a startup company focusing on open source AI research and is headquartered in Austin, Texas, USA. The company originated from the open source AI research community in 2022 and mainly develops open source large language models and AI Agent products. The company is led by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malh