Nous Research Hits $1.5B Valuation, Pitches Hermes to Firms
Nous Research, the startup behind the open source Hermes Agent, has confirmed a $90 million Series B round that values the company at $1.5 billion. TechCrunch had reported the deal earlier, and the company has now made it official. The money will fund a new product line aimed at companies, not just the developers and individual users who made Hermes popular in the first place.
The announcement covers three things: who is backing the company, how widely its open source agent is already used, and how Nous plans to turn that reach into business revenue.
Who put money in
Robot Ventures led the round. Several other investors took part:
- Nvidia
- Union Square Ventures
- Menlo Ventures
- Samsung
- 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner
Nous Research is three years old. With this round, it has raised $158 million in total. That puts more than half of its lifetime funding into a single Series B, which is a large share for a young company.
The investor list is mixed. It includes a chipmaker, a consumer electronics group, established venture firms, and a politically connected fund. Nous has not detailed what role each backer will play beyond providing capital.
How big Hermes Agent already is
Hermes Agent is popular with developers and individual users. According to the startup's own estimates, it has been cloned more than 24 million times. Nous also estimates that Hermes drives roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage. Tokens are the small units of text that language models read and produce, and they are the usual basis for measuring and billing AI workloads.
Both figures come from the company and have not been independently verified. Still, they explain why investors were willing to pay a high price. An open source project can spread quickly without a sales team. What remains unproven is whether those users will turn into paying customers.
Hermes for Businesses
That question is what the new financing is meant to answer. Nous is moving into the enterprise market with "Hermes for Businesses," which lets companies deploy customized AI agents. According to the company, these agents can handle multi-step workflows while keeping company data private and secure.
That pitch addresses the two concerns that usually slow down enterprise adoption of agents. The first is reliability over long chains of tasks: an agent that gets one step wrong can derail the whole workflow. The second is data handling. Businesses want agents that can work with internal documents and systems without sending sensitive information to places it should not go.
Nous has not published pricing or a list of launch customers for the business product, and it has not said which industries it is targeting first.
The revenue picture
The Wall Street Journal reported that Nous had reached roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026. The company expects to pass $100 million before the end of the year, according to the same report.
Growing from $36 million to more than $100 million in about three and a half months would be very fast growth. The enterprise launch is presumably a big part of how Nous plans to get there, although the reporting does not break down where the expected revenue would come from.
What This Means
This round fits a pattern we keep seeing in agent tooling: the open source project builds reach, and the paid product is sold to enterprises. The difficult part is making that second step work, and Nous now has to show it can.
The competition for that business is heavy. Large vendors are building agents into software that companies already use, as with SAP's Joule work layer. Platforms like Cohere are adding cost controls such as token spending caps. An open source origin may help Nous with companies that want to see how the software works. But it does not prove the security claims on its own.
The privacy promise matters because agents have already caused real damage, including cases where agents leaked company screenshots. It is worth watching whether Nous publishes concrete security details, names its business customers, and whether the $100 million forecast actually holds up.