Nous Research is finalizing a funding round that roughly doubles its valuation in a single year, and it's doing it with software anyone can download for free.
Nous Research is closing in on $75 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. That's the headline.
The deal is being led by Robot Ventures, with USV and other investors joining in, according to a report from TechCrunch published July 13, 2026. It's a striking number for a company whose flagship product, the Hermes agent, is free to download and free to run on your own machine.
Hermes isn't a walled garden. You can pull it from GitHub and run it locally, or park it on your own virtual private server. No middleman. It already comes with web search, coding, and image understanding built in, and it picks up new skills from how you actually use it. Don't want to manage the infrastructure yourself? Nous sells a cloud-hosted version for $20 to $200 a month. The project has pulled in roughly 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks on GitHub. That's a lot of stars. It is an unusual scale of adoption for something anyone can fork for free, let alone a paid enterprise tool.
That's the bet Robot Ventures and USV are making: open code and a large, engaged community can still add up to a business worth $1.5 billion, even while plenty of AI companies with far less transparent stacks command bigger checks on thinner products.
From Crypto Money to a Free Agent
Nous was founded in 2023. Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra built it. Before this round it had raised $70 million from Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan. That earlier money carried a distinctly crypto flavor: Paradigm is a crypto focused fund. And Nous's other flagship project, Psyche, is a decentralized training network that coordinates GPU contributions from around the world through the Solana blockchain. Few labs straddle both worlds this comfortably. Nous built Psyche on an in-house optimizer called DisTrO, which cuts how much data needs to move between machines during training. The team proved it out in December 2024, pretraining a 15 billion parameter model in a distributed setup. The testnet went live in May 2025. That's quick work. A $50 million Series A led by Paradigm backed it that April.
Together AI Sets the Comparison
The new round lands right after Together AI raised $800 million at an $8.3 billion valuation, in a deal Aramco Ventures led on July 1, 2026. That's more than double what Together AI was worth in its February 2025 Series B. Both are selling the same pitch, at bottom. Open models, whether run on someone else's infrastructure or your own, are a real alternative to closed systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. Together AI's bookings crossed $1.15 billion last quarter, driven by companies running open models like DeepSeek and Kimi instead of paying for closed APIs.
That's a different business, though. Both rounds land amid growing chatter about an AI SaaS valuation reckoning, where thin-margin wrapper companies are getting priced like infrastructure. Investors backing Nous and Together AI are drawing a sharper line than that: they're paying for the plumbing and the open code, not the wrapper sitting on top of someone else's model. Plumbing beats paint.
What Nous Still Has to Prove
None of this guarantees Nous a clear path to Together AI's revenue. Selling a $20 to $200 monthly subscription on top of free software is a much harder climb. Renting GPU capacity to enterprises with real budgets is a different game entirely. But 214,000 GitHub stars is not a number anyone can fake. It gives Nous something a lot of better-funded competitors still lack. A community that showed up before the money did.
Also read: Steve Klinsky Says Wall Street Is Overreacting to the AI SaaS Panic • Satya Nadella warns you pay for AI intelligence twice, in cash and in secrets • Together AI raised $800 million on the bet that cheaper AI wins
