Nous Research Raises $90 Million at $1.5B Valuation for Hermes Agent
Led by Robot Ventures with backing from Nvidia and Samsung, the Series B funding will accelerate the rollout of Hermes for Businesses.
Key takeaways
- Nous Research raised $90 million in Series B funding led by Robot Ventures, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.
- Investors include Nvidia, Samsung, Microsoft's M12, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Y Combinator, and 1789 Capital.
- According to Nous Research's internal estimates, its open-source Hermes AI agent has surpassed 24 million clones and accounts for roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage.
- Annualized revenue reached $36 million by mid-September 2026, with Nous projecting to cross $100 million before the end of 2026.
- The fresh funding will support 'Hermes for Businesses' to give companies private, customizable AI workflows across multiple models.
Open-source artificial intelligence lab Nous Research announced on October 7, 2026, that it has raised $90 million in a Series B funding round to scale its Hermes AI agent for enterprise customers. The round was led by early-stage investment firm Robot Ventures, with participation from Nvidia, Samsung, Microsoft's venture fund M12, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Y Combinator, and 1789 Capital. According to reporting from The Wall Street Journal cited by TechCrunch, the new financing values the three-year-old startup at $1.5 billion and lifts its total raised capital to $158 million.
Writing in an announcement on the company's website, chief executive Dillon Rolnick stated that the funding will advance Nous Research's push to prevent artificial intelligence from becoming centralized inside walled gardens. Rolnick noted that while "$90 million is modest in modern fundraising," the startup intends to use the capital to build an open, auditable alternative to closed proprietary ecosystems, as detailed in Nous Research's fundraise announcement.
Rapid Growth and Token Usage for the Hermes AI Agent
Nous Research initially formed in 2023 with a focus on post-training open-weight models. The team first gained attention by fine-tuning Meta's open-source Llama architectures around "user-alignment," ensuring model responses matched individual user viewpoints rather than corporate constraints. The company also developed YaRN, a method designed to expand context windows for open models at lower compute costs, as well as synthetic dataset generation tools such as DataForge.
In February 2026, the lab released Hermes under the permissive MIT license. According to its website, as reported by TNW, Hermes works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and through apps such as Slack, WhatsApp, and Telegram. The agent can examine local files, execute code inside isolated Docker containers, automate browser tasks, and create reusable software skills on the fly.
Adoption of the agent expanded rapidly following its winter launch. According to company figures, Hermes has been cloned more than 24 million times by developers and organizations worldwide, supported by thousands of open-source contributors. Nous estimates that runtime executions of Hermes account for approximately 2.5% of all AI token usage globally, reflecting massive compute consumption across both consumer and commercial deployments.
Underpinning Hermes is a model routing mechanism designed to dispatch specific tasks to the most suitable engine. Users can direct instructions to external proprietary models such as Claude, or run customized open models developed in-house by Nous. The lab's Hermes 4 model family, for example, was trained on 5 million synthetic records—two-thirds of which were optimized specifically to boost multi-step reasoning capabilities, according to technical details shared by SiliconANGLE.
Monetization Strategy and Hermes for Businesses
The Series B funding will primarily finance the commercial rollout of "Hermes for Businesses." While the core Hermes codebase remains freely accessible under the MIT license, Nous Research has established three paid commercial tiers: Hermes Cloud, Hermes Business, and Hermes Enterprise.
Hermes Cloud allows individual users and small teams to launch managed agents without maintaining local hardware or servers. The higher-tier business and enterprise packages introduce centralized administrative governance, permitting IT managers to enforce team token limits and allow coworkers to securely share agent-created customizations, according to SiliconANGLE. Enterprise setups can also link the agent to specialized data stores like RetainDB, enabling Hermes to preserve institutional knowledge, long-term memory, and project state across multi-user sessions.
Nous argues that this architecture offers companies an alternative to closed enterprise platforms by allowing them to select models according to price and performance while preventing corporate data from being locked inside a vendor's proprietary cloud. The commercial strategy has already begun translating into significant top-line revenue. Figures cited from The Wall Street Journal by TechCrunch show Nous reached approximately $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026, with internal projections expecting that figure to exceed $100 million before the end of the year.
Market Dynamics and the Open Agent Race
The funding round arrives as both early-stage ventures and established tech giants direct substantial capital toward autonomous AI agents. As tracked by TNW and Wowtale, competitor Instinct recently secured $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation for consumer automation agents, while framework developer LangChain raised $125 million at unicorn status. Major technology firms have also entered the personal agent market, including Meta with Muse and OpenAI with Dots.
Concurrently, open-source competitors such as OpenClaw—which Nvidia has utilized to build its own enterprise framework—continue to draw developer interest alongside European foundation model developer Mistral AI, which raised €1.7 billion. By providing a multi-model agent that can run locally or in private cloud instances, Nous Research is positioning Hermes to compete directly against proprietary platforms while maintaining strong open-source developer loyalty.
Frequently asked questions
How much funding did Nous Research raise, and who led the round?
Nous Research raised $90 million in a Series B funding round led by Robot Ventures, with backing from Nvidia, Samsung, Microsoft's M12, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Y Combinator, and 1789 Capital.
What is the valuation of Nous Research following the Series B round?
The round values Nous Research at $1.5 billion, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal confirmed by TechCrunch.
What is Hermes AI agent and what license does it use?
Hermes is an AI agent capable of multi-step autonomous tasks, file interaction, code execution, and web navigation. It was released in February 2026 under the open-source MIT license.
What are Nous Research's current revenue numbers?
According to The Wall Street Journal, Nous Research reached roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026 and projects exceeding $100 million before the end of 2026.
Sources
- Nous Research raises $90M to take its Hermes AI agent to businessesTNW | Investors-funding · Oct 7, 2026
- Nous Research confirms it hit $1.5B valuation, launches AI agents for business usersTechCrunch · Oct 7, 2026
- Nvidia, Samsung back $90M round for AI agent startup Nous ResearchSiliconANGLE · Oct 8, 2026
- A Note on Our Fundraisenousresearch.com · Oct 7, 2026
- Nous Research raises $90 million at a $1.5 billion valuation — TechCrunchUA.NEWS · Oct 7, 2026
- Open-Source AI Agent Maker Nous Research Raises $90M - WOWTALEWowtale · Oct 7, 2026
How this story was made: the newsroom picked it up from Techmeme, Google News and techcrunch.com, gathered the full text of the sources above, and drafted it with AI assistance. Every factual claim was then checked against those sources before publishing (25 claims checked). Illustrations marked as AI-generated are not photographs. Spotted an error? Tell us.
Published October 8, 2026 at 02:51 UTC
