New Delhi, July 14 -- SAN FRANCISCO - Two years ago, a small team of AI researchers published a model called Hermes to GitHub. They did not charge for it. They did not require an API key. Anyone could download it and run their own AI agent on a laptop, a cheap server, or a rented cloud instance. Today, Hermes has more than 214,000 GitHub stars and roughly 40,000 forks. That is not a hobby project. It is a platform, and investors are beginning to treat it as one.

Nous Research, the company behind Hermes, is in active talks to raise at least $75 million in a new funding round that would value the startup at $1.5 billion, TechCrunch reported Sunday. Robot Ventures, which already holds a stake in the company, is expected to lead the round. N...