Nous Research Raises $90 Million to Bring Its Open-Source AI Agent Into Businesses

Nous Research has raised $90 million to bring its open-source Hermes AI agent deeper into businesses. The Series B, announced October 7, values the startup at a reported $1.5 billion. Nous says the money will fund Hermes for Businesses, extending its premise that users should choose their models and control the knowledge their AI accumulates.

Robot Ventures led the round. In its fundraising note, Nous named Nvidia, Microsoft’s M12, Samsung, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Menlo Ventures among the investors. TechCrunch reported that the financing brings the company’s total funding to $158 million. Nous formed in 2023 with a stated goal of resisting closed, centralized AI systems.

An agent that can change its underlying model

Hermes is an agent, not just a language model answering questions. Its desktop app can work with files and programs on a user’s computer. It can organize documents, use a browser to retrieve information and run code in a Docker container, an isolated software environment. Those tools let it act on tasks rather than only describe how to do them.

The language model underneath can come from another provider, such as Claude, or from Nous’s own lineup. SiliconANGLE describes a built-in router that sends prompts to the model best suited to handle them, weighing cost, speed and output quality. A separate personalization component adjusts responses to user preferences.

Nous says Hermes remembers projects, creates reusable skills as it works and carries that knowledge across sessions. Users choose where the agent runs and which models it uses. The company released Hermes Agent in February under an MIT license, keeping the underlying agent openly licensed as it builds paid services around it.

One principle has stayed constant since the first Hermes release: the people using an AI system should control it.

Dillon Rolnick, CEO of Nous Research, in the company’s fundraising note

Selling administration around open software

The new funding is aimed at making that control useful to companies. Nous says Hermes for Businesses will help organizations select models at prices suited to their goals, manage spending and retain control over institutional knowledge. It also promises private, safe scaling of AI use. These are the company’s intended benefits, not independently demonstrated outcomes of the financing.

Nous already monetizes Hermes through three paid editions, which serve different setup and administration needs:

• Hermes Cloud lets consumers launch agents without setting up infrastructure.
• Hermes Business and Hermes Enterprise let administrators set team-level token-use limits and users share agent customizations with colleagues.

That puts the commercial emphasis on operating agents for groups: controlling shared consumption and passing useful customizations between workers. The financing will support broader adoption of the business editions, according to SiliconANGLE.

Adoption claims meet a revenue target

Nous says Hermes has been cloned more than 24 million times, with thousands of contributors helping build it and thousands more building on top. The company also estimates that Hermes drives approximately 2.5% of global token usage—the text units processed by AI models. That share is based on Nous’s internal estimates, not an independent measurement.

The business has a separate financial measure. The Wall Street Journal reported that Nous was generating roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026, according to SiliconANGLE and TechCrunch. Nous expects that figure to exceed $100 million by year’s end. That is a forecast, and annualized revenue describes a run rate rather than revenue collected over a full year.