Nous Research, the startup behind the open-source Hermes agent, is finalizing a new round of funding led by Robot Ventures, with significant participation from USV and other prominent investors at a $1.5 billion valuation, according to three sources with knowledge of the deal. The company is raising at least $75 million, and fielded a high level of interest from investors, according to the people. The company was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, Shivani Mitra. Before this round, it had raised a total of $70 million in funding from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan, according to Crunchbase. Weeks after Openclaw's agent went viral, Nous Research released its own competitor called Hermes. OpenClaw is an agent that runs locally on a PC and can perform tasks on behalf of the user. One key difference is that Hermes shipped with built-in 'skills,' such as web search, coding and image...
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