Nous Research, the brains behind open-source agent Hermes, is about to see its valuation soar to $1.5 billion. The company has secured at least $75 million from top investors in a round led by Robot Ventures and joined by USV.

Born in 2023, Nous Research’s journey isn’t without competition. Just weeks after the viral OpenClaw agent hit the market, Hermes entered the fray with built-in skills for web search, coding, and image understanding. Unlike its predecessor, Hermes learns from users’ habits to expand its capabilities automatically.

Users can now automate tasks with Hermes or any of Noah Research’s other tools on platforms like Telegram and Discord. With robust support in both open-source and cloud-hosted formats, the company has garnered a massive following, boasting 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks on GitHub.

As these AI agents become more powerful and user-friendly, the question remains: how many can one person handle? Will users embrace the convenience of cloud-hosted services or stick to self-hosted options? Only time—and a healthy dose of patience—will tell as Nous Research continues to expand its horizons.