NR

Nous Research

Foundation Models

Open-source AI lab building the Hermes agent and its underlying models, sold through Nous Portal's metered API access and Hermes Cloud's always-on agent hosting, alongside Solana-coordinated distributed model training.

Total funding$70M

Valuation—

Employees—

Founded2022

HeadquartersNew York, USA

StatusPrivate

Products

Selected offerings — the AI products recorded here, not the vendor's full catalogue.

• Hermes Agent AI agent Sold on its own

  MIT-licensed autonomous agent that keeps memory across sessions and calls 200+ models and hosted tools through a Nous Portal account or a self-supplied API key.

• Nous Portal API service Sold on its own

  Metered account for Hermes Agent and third-party apps: chat and API access to 200+ models plus a hosted tool gateway, billed through monthly credit-included subscription tiers.

Inside Nous Portal

• Hermes Cloud Infrastructure service Paid add-on to the parent

  Always-on hosted instances that keep a Hermes Agent running and accumulating memory continuously, billed daily against the same Nous Portal credit balance that pays for model and tool usage.

Similar products 43

No sourced competitor yet: no filing, vendor document or measured-market report read so far names a rival for this company, so none is asserted. The companies below are the closest by what their products do.

How this list is ranked ↗

ALAI21 LabsPrivate · $1.4BNous Portal and AI21 Intelligent Gateway both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (private).2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareBBaiduPublic · $31.6BNous Portal and Baidu Qianfan both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (public).2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareAAlphabet (Google)Public · $4.2TNous Portal and Cloud Translation both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (public).2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareAAlibabaPublic · $273.4BNous Portal and Alibaba Cloud Model Studio both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (public).3 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareOFOpenClaw FoundationPrivateHermes Agent and OpenClaw both serve buyers who need to keep an assistant's memory of a company or team; OpenClaw Foundation's scale not recorded.1 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareCCoherePrivate · $7BHermes Cloud and Model Vault do comparable work on model hosting; similar scale (private).3 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareSSenseTimePublic · $7.7BHermes Cloud and Elastic Container Platform do comparable work on model hosting; similar scale (public).2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareDDecartPrivate · $4BNous Portal and Cogito both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (private).2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareBFBlack Forest LabsPrivate · $3.3BNous Portal and FLUX API both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (private).Shared product typeCompareTTencentPublic · $510.1BHermes Cloud and Tencent Cloud HAI do comparable work on model hosting; similar scale (public).3 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareKKuaishouPublic · $18.6BNous Portal and Kling AI Developer API both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (public); ships application, developer tool and 2 more rather than the same layer.2 of 3 capabilitiesDifferent layerCompareCCore42PrivateNous Portal and Core42 Compass both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; Core42's scale not recorded.2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareHFHugging FacePrivate · $4.5BNous Portal and Inference Providers both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (private).2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareFAFireworks AIPrivate · $17.5BNous Portal and Fireworks Nexus both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (private).3 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareOOllamaPrivate · $88M raisedHermes Cloud and Ollama do comparable work on model hosting; same layer and the same scale band (early-stage private).2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeSame scale bandCompareMMicrosoftPublic · $3.7TNous Portal and Foundry Models both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (public).3 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareFFalPrivateHermes Cloud and fal Serverless do comparable work on model hosting; Fal's scale not recorded.3 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareVVercelPrivate · $9.3BNous Portal and Vercel AI Gateway both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (private).3 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareMModularAcquired ($3.1B deal)Hermes Cloud and Modular Cloud do comparable work on model hosting; Modular is acquired, with no independent scale.2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareOOraclePublic · $454.4BNous Portal and Generative AI Capabilities both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (public).2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareHHeliconeAcquiredNous Portal and Helicone AI Gateway both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; Helicone is acquired, with no independent scale.1 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareRRunPodPrivateHermes Cloud and Serverless do comparable work on model hosting; RunPod's scale not recorded.2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareGG42Private · $2.3B raisedNous Portal and Jais both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (private); ships model API rather than the same layer.1 of 3 capabilitiesDifferent layerCompareLCLG CorpPublic · $13.4BNous Portal and K-EXAONE 2.0 both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (public); ships model API rather than the same layer.1 of 3 capabilitiesDifferent layerCompareRReplicatePrivateHermes Cloud and Replicate do comparable work on model hosting; Replicate's scale not recorded.2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareAAmazonPublic · $2.8TNous Portal and Amazon Bedrock both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (public).3 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareLLambdaPrivate · $1.5B raisedNous Portal and Lambda Inference both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (private).2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareNGNebius GroupPublic · $61.6BHermes Cloud and Serverless AI do comparable work on model hosting; similar scale (public).2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareCSCerebras SystemsPublic · $44.4BNous Portal and Cerebras Inference both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (public); ships hardware, model API and 1 more rather than the same layer.1 of 3 capabilitiesDifferent layerCompareBBasetenPrivate · $13BHermes Cloud and Baseten Frontier Gateway do comparable work on model hosting; similar scale (private).2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareAAAleph AlphaPrivate · $500M raisedNous Portal and Pharia-1-LLM both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (private); ships model API and platform rather than the same layer.1 of 3 capabilitiesDifferent layerCompareDDatabricksPrivate · $190BNous Portal and Unity Gateway both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (private).3 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareHCHuawei CloudPrivateNous Portal and MaaS both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; Huawei Cloud's scale not recorded.2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareMAMoonshot AIPrivate · $35BOverlaps on agent orchestration; similar scale (private).1 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareYYandexPublicNous Portal and Yandex Translate both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; Yandex's scale not recorded.3 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareHCH CompanyPrivate · $220M raisedOverlaps on agent orchestration and model inference; similar scale (private).2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareMModalPrivate · $466M raisedHermes Cloud and Modal Inference do comparable work on model hosting; similar scale (private).2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareUUpstagePrivate · $958.8MNous Portal and Solar LLMs both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (private).2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareVVMwareAcquiredHermes Cloud and VMware Cloud Foundation Private AI Services do comparable work on model hosting; VMware is acquired, with no independent scale.2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompareNCNAVER CloudPrivateNous Portal and Papago Translation both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; NAVER Cloud's scale not recorded.2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompare0101.AIPrivateNous Portal and Yi both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; 01.AI's scale not recorded; ships application, model API and 1 more rather than the same layer.2 of 3 capabilitiesDifferent layerCompareEElasticPublic · $10.2BNous Portal and Elastic Inference Service both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API; similar scale (public); ships agent platform, application and 2 more rather than the same layer.3 of 3 capabilitiesDifferent layerCompareCCivitaiPrivate · $5.1M raisedHermes Cloud and Civitai API do comparable work on model hosting; similar scale (private).2 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeCompare

Closest alternatives are pairs a vendor page itself compares. Similar products are matched from what each product does; nothing in that group is asserted as a rivalry.

Sources

Total funding

News reporting · 13 Jul 2026

TechCrunch, 2026-07-13: "Before this round, it had raised a total of $70 million in funding from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, Delphi Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan." That $70M includes the $50M Series A Paradigm led on 2026-04-25. The further $75M+ this same article reports (see provenance.valuation) was still "in talks" and being "finalized" as of this date -- unclosed, so it is not added to the total here.

Valuation

News reporting · 13 Jul 2026

No equity valuation is published, so this field is null rather than an estimate. Paradigm's 2026-04-25 $50M Series A is widely reported (The Block, The Defiant, Yahoo Finance/Reuters) at "a $1 billion token valuation" -- explicitly a CRYPTO TOKEN valuation on Solana, not an equity valuation, and not the same measure valuation records elsewhere in this catalogue. TechCrunch, 2026-07-13, reports a further raise "in talks" and "finalizing" "at least $75 million" at a "$1.5 billion valuation" -- unclosed as of that date, so it is not recorded as a completed valuation either. See docs/audits/company-admission-standard.md §3: a valuation denominated in something other than equity is never written into this field, even qualified.

Founded

News reporting · 25 Apr 2026

"created in 2022 as a group of volunteers who met on social media and software platforms including Discord, GitHub, and Twitter." No firmer incorporation date was found; this is the earliest sourced statement of when Nous Research began.

Description

Company disclosure · 18 Sep 2026

Homepage, read 2026-09-18: Nous Research describes itself as "a leader in the American open source AI movement" that trains "world-class open source language models and build[s] infrastructure to coordinate distributed, unbiased training."

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