raise

A fundraising desk for Hermes Agent: it learns your company, ranks investors on cited evidence, drafts outreach into your mailbox, and refuses what it shouldn't do. It never sends.

A skill can suggest. A plugin can refuse.

A prompt can tell a model to be careful. Raise puts the rules in code, in hooks and tool handlers the model cannot talk its way past.

Draft gate. raise_can_draft runs before any draft is written. It refuses when:
- the target is archived, excluded, passed or committed, or marked do-not-contact;
- there is no named person (Raise drafts to a person, never to a firm), or the "name" looks like a firm or like several people;
- a colleague at the same firm passed (a pass applies to the whole firm), is in talks, or was contacted in the last 14 days (one conversation per firm);
- the last touch is less than 3 working days old, or the target is parked until a later date;
- an earlier draft for this person is still unsent;
- the firm failed a firm gate (stage, cheque size, geography, an exclusion, no recent activity);
- there is no open contact route left.
Routes run in a fixed order: warm intro, LinkedIn DM (if connected), connect request, email (confirmed address only), firm inbox. Three touches per channel in 180 days, then it moves on.
Evidence-first scoring. The model proposes a 0 to 10 score per dimension and cites evidence ids. A dimension with no valid citation is set to 0. Code computes the total from fixed weights, and reachability comes from the contact route, not from the model.
Claim check. After the model writes a draft, lint compares every number in it against your verified claims and the investor's cited facts. An unverified figure (say, an ARR number from a deck that you never confirmed) blocks the draft. So does a draft with no investor-specific fact. One rewrite pass runs on style warnings (stock phrases, em dashes, "not X but Y", missing closing question, too long) and the draft is checked again.
LinkedIn caps and pause. Profile views, reads and messages have daily caps, jittered per day. Writes are off by default. A login, checkpoint or rate-limit error in a LinkedIn tool result pauses all LinkedIn tools for 72 hours.
Email guard. A pre_tool_call hook looks at any mail tool aimed at an address in your pipeline. Sending (send, reply, forward) to an investor is always refused. Creating a draft is allowed only when the body matches a draft Raise already approved (sha256 of the text). Mail to anyone else is not touched.

Quick start

hermes plugins install GenesisEngine-Triolith/raise
hermes plugins enable raise

/raise demo loads a fictional company and 40 invented investors. No accounts, no network. You can rank, draft, check replies and see the daily brief right away.
/raise demo clear removes the demo before you set up your own company. /raise setup offers to do this for you, and Raise refuses to import investors or save a profile while the demo is loaded, so fictional and real data never mix. The demo never loads over your own data, and clear never deletes it.
/raise setup starts onboarding for your own company.

How to use it

After setup, every step is a sentence you type in chat. /raise next shows where you are at any point, and "do my next Raise steps" has the agent do them.

| Step | Say this | What Raise does |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Find investors | "find 5 investors for my round" | The raise:discover skill searches public sources and imports people, not just firms. People already in your pipeline are skipped, so you can ask again for 5 more. You can also import a CSV, your CRM or sheet, or LinkedIn Connections.csv. |
| 2. Research them | "research the new investors" | raise_find reads each investor's site and deals and stores facts with their sources, then checks the firm gates (stage, cheque, geography, still active). |
| 3. Rank them | "rank them" | The agent scores each dimension by citing evidence ids. An uncited score counts as 0, and code computes the total. "Why is X third?" shows the evidence. |
| 4. Draft | "draft emails for my top 5" | Each investor goes through the draft gate first. Raise refuses anyone you already emailed in the last 3 working days, anyone with an unsent draft, any firm that passed or is already in talks with a colleague, and anyone at 3 touches on that channel. Every draft is then linted against your verified claims. Email drafts land in your mailbox's drafts folder. |
| 5. Send and log | send it yourself, then "I sent the email to Ann" | Raise never sends. Logging the send (raise_log) is how the gates know who you contacted, so log every message you send, including ones you wrote yourself. |
| 6. Replies | "check replies" | Replies are sorted (interest, question, pass, soft pass, out of office) with the investor's own words quoted. A pass closes the firm; a soft pass comes back in 90 days. |
| 7. Every day | /raise next | Up to 5 actions: replies first, then follow-ups due, drafts waiting, investors to research or rank, then new outreach. |

Repeat steps 1-4 whenever the pipeline runs thin. Each tool result also names the next step, so the agent keeps going in order.

Tools that make Raise better

Raise has no network code of its own. It uses the tools your Hermes already has and finds them by name, so the more you connect, the more it can do. Nothing here is required: with no extra tools, Raise still works with a CSV import, local SQLite and drafts saved as files.

| For | Connect | How |
|---|---|---|
| Research (finding investors, reading their sites) | A web search and a page reader: Firecrawl, Tavily, Exa, Parallel, Perplexity, Brave or SearXNG. A Nous Portal subscription includes search and page reading. | hermes setup tools. Jina Reader or another reader works as an MCP server via hermes mcp. |
| Email drafts in your mailbox | A mail tool that can create drafts: a Gmail, Google Workspace or Outlook MCP server, or a mail skill | hermes mcp, then set email_mode with /raise setup |
| Replies | The same mail tool's search or read tool | Found automatically |
| Your pipeline in a CRM or sheet | Notion, Airtable, Google Sheets or HubSpot | hermes connectors connect notion (or airtable), or an MCP server via hermes mcp, then choose it in /raise setup |
| LinkedIn (optional) | A LinkedIn MCP server | hermes mcp. Raise caps daily use and pauses for 72 hours after a login or rate-limit error. |

Research reads up to 5 pages per investor and asks your model to pull out dated, sourced facts, so it takes a while per investor. A fast model with a large context window works best.

What it does

Onboarding and grill. Asks where your pipeline lives, how email and LinkedIn should work, then reads your deck, URL or notes into a draft profile. The raise:grill skill interviews you across 13 branches (problem, customer, traction, round, ideal investor and so on) and saves after every answer. Each gap comes with a plain consequence, for example "Traction 40%: drafts can only cite verified traction facts."
Import. CSV, a LinkedIn Connections.csv, or rows your agent reads from Notion, Sheets, Airtable or HubSpot using your own Hermes tools. The built-in SQLite database is the engine. People are deduplicated by person, not by firm domain. A person with no firm is an angel. Connections at a pipeline firm become intro paths.
Research. Uses whatever web_search and web_extract tools you already have. Facts are stored with a source URL and only kept if that URL was fetched in the same call. Firm gates then mark each check pass, fail or unknown. Missing evidence is unknown, never fail.
Rank. Nine weighted dimensions. raise_explain shows the score, the cited evidence and the gate result for any investor. raise_focus returns your top N, one person per firm.
Draft. Writes with layered skills: bundled raise:draft and raise:humanizer, then your own draft_skills, then the lint above. Approved drafts go into your mailbox as drafts, however you connect your mail: an MCP server or plugin tool that creates drafts (Gmail, Google Workspace, Outlook/M365, raw-MIME Gmail API tools) is called directly; with only a skill or CLI, Raise saves the checked body to raise-outbox/<id>.txt and the agent makes the draft from that file. Send calls to an investor are blocked on every route, including terminal commands. LinkedIn and intro messages stay in Raise for you to paste. Without an LLM, a deterministic template that must also pass lint is used.
Replies. Searches your mailbox for answers from people you contacted and classifies each as pass, soft pass, interest, question, redirect or out of office, with a quote from the message. The quote must exist in the text, or confidence is low and nothing is applied. A pass closes the whole firm, except colleagues already in talks.
Daily brief. At most 5 actions: replies to answer, follow-ups due, drafts waiting, top targets ready for a first draft.
Automation blueprints. daily-brief, reply-check and weekly-pipeline-review for Hermes cron. They draft only and never ask questions in unattended runs.

Tools

| Tool | Use it to |
|---|---|
| raise_setup | Step through onboarding (one question per call) |
| raise_setup_status | See config, detected tools, counts, profile completeness, LinkedIn pause |
| raise_profile_get | Read the profile, claims and branch completeness |
| raise_profile_set | Save profile fields, branch answers and tagged claims (verified, unverified, projection) |
| raise_import | Import rows, a CSV or a LinkedIn Connections.csv |
| raise_find | Research one investor and store cited facts |
| raise_evidence_add | Add a fact by hand (source URL required) |
| raise_evidence_list | List stored facts for an investor |
| raise_rank | Score an investor from model-proposed, evidence-cited dimensions |
| raise_focus | Top N open targets that passed the firm gates |
| raise_explain | Show why an investor scored what it did |
| raise_can_draft | Ask the draft gate before writing anything |
| raise_draft | Write, check and place drafts; lists refusals with reasons |
| raise_log | Record a touch, reply, pass, soft pass, in talks, committed or note |
| raise_replies_check | Fetch and classify replies |
| raise_brief | Today's actions |
| raise_stats | Counts by stage, gate, draft status, channel and reply |
| raise_export | Rows or CSV of the pipeline, each with its latest draft; target_ids for just some. Ask "draft two investors and put them in my CRM" and the agent writes the rows with your HubSpot/Pipedrive/Notion/Sheets tool |
| raise_sync | Rows changed since the last export, to write to your own tracker |
| raise_demo | Load the demo, or clear it (demo data only) |

Commands

| Command | Does |
|---|---|
| /raise status | Setup and pipeline status |
| /raise setup | Start or resume onboarding |
| /raise next | The daily brief as text |
| /raise drafts | Drafts waiting for you |
| /raise replies | Check replies |
| /raise demo | Load the demo; /raise demo clear removes it |
| /raise export | Export the pipeline |
| /raise delete confirm | Wipe all Raise data (without confirm it only explains) |

CLI: hermes raise setup, doctor, export, demo [load|clear], delete. doctor checks the database, detected tools, profile completeness, LinkedIn pause state, bundled skills and config.

Bundled skills: raise:draft, raise:humanizer, raise:grill, raise:voice, raise:fact-check, raise:validate, raise:discover, raise:reply-triage.

Configuration

Set under plugins.entries.raise.settings.

| Key | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| backend | sqlite | sqlite, notion, sheets, airtable, hubspot or csv. SQLite is always the engine; others are read and written through your own tools |
| email_mode | none | gmail or other: Raise calls your draft tool. none: checked drafts go to raise-outbox/ for your mail skill or for copying |
| email_draft_tool | auto | Name of your draft-creating email tool, or auto to detect |
| email_search_tool | auto | Name of your mailbox search tool, or auto |
| linkedin_mode | off | off, read_only or draft_dms |
| linkedin_profile_views_per_day | 20 | Cap on profile views |
| linkedin_reads_per_day | 40 | Cap on other reads |
| linkedin_messages_per_day | 0 | Cap on LinkedIn writes (0 means none) |
| draft_skills | [] | Your own voice or style skills, applied after the bundled ones |
| founder_name | "" | Name used to sign drafts |
| focus_size | 10 | Size of the focus list |
| demo_mode | false | Set by /raise demo; places drafts in a local folder instead of a mailbox |

Safety and disclosures

Draft-only. No send tool exists in Raise. The email guard refuses sends to investors even if another tool or a prompt asks for one.
Network. Raise opens no connections itself. Anything that reaches the network (web search, page fetches, email, Notion, LinkedIn) goes through tools you already have in Hermes, called with dispatch_tool, and the LinkedIn and email hooks apply to them.
Model calls. Raise uses your configured Hermes model through ctx.llm. Deck text, your profile and the investor facts it works on are sent to that model, so check your provider's terms for confidential material.
Local data. Everything is stored in <HERMES_HOME>/plugin-data/raise/data.db. Demo drafts go to <HERMES_HOME>/plugin-data/raise/demo-drafts/.
No telemetry. Nothing is reported anywhere.
No credentials. Raise stores no keys or passwords and does not read .env files.
Untrusted content. Web pages and email bodies are wrapped as untrusted data, and extraction runs in a model call with no tools. The demo includes a page with a hidden injection to show it being ignored.
Unattended runs. Cron runs never ask questions and never send. When a step needs you, the result says so and waits.
Your data, your call. /raise export or hermes raise export writes your pipeline out. /raise delete confirm or hermes raise delete removes it.

Credits

humanizer: blader/humanizer v3.1.0, MIT licence, Copyright (c) 2025 Siqi Chen. https://github.com/blader/humanizer (bundled unchanged, with its LICENSE file in humanizer/).
Bundled skills grill, voice and fact-check are adapted from community skills of the same names; if you authored one of them, open an issue and we will add your credit and link.
validate, discover, draft and reply-triage are original to Raise.

License

README from the reviewed commit 0926ac3; it updates when the author re-pins.