Nous Research secures $75 million at $1.5 billion valuation

AI startup Nous Research announced it is closing a funding round of at least $75 million, valuing the company at $1.5 billion. The round is led by Robot Ventures with significant participation from USV and other investors. The financing comes less than three months after a $50 million Series A and adds to prior capital of roughly $70 million raised from backers such as Paradigm, North Island Ventures and OSS Capital.

Founded in 2023, Nous Research builds open‑source artificial‑intelligence tools, most notably the Hermes agent, an open‑weight language model that can run locally or in the cloud and includes built‑in skills for web search, coding and image understanding. The firm also offers the Forge Reasoning API, the Nous Chat platform, and the Psyche infrastructure for decentralized AI training across underutilized hardware. Investors are betting on the company’s ability to turn its open‑source stack into a broader software business and to compete with closed, subscription‑based AI assistants.

The new capital is expected to expand Hermes product offerings, scale the distributed training network, and accelerate development of additional APIs and services.