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Startups & Venture·July 13, 2026·1 min read

Hermes agent maker Nous Research in talks for new funding at $1.5B valuation

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A $1.5B mark for an open-weight agent stack is a pricing signal on where value may accrue in the agent era—coordination layers, not just base models. If you’re building on open models, assume your infra and orchestration vendors will start to look and behave like growth-stage SaaS, not hobby projects.

Startups & Venture

InstaLILY, which develops AI agents to automate sales, operations, and service workflows, raised a $60M Series B led by Energize Capital

Agentic AI is moving from experiments to funded line-of-business automation — $60M into InstaLILY for sales, ops, and service ‘teammates’ is a bet that domain-specific workflows, not generic copilots, will own the budget. If you run a revenue or CX org, you now have to decide whether to buy vertical agents like this or let internal teams build on general-purpose stacks.