Nous Research Raises $90M Series B at $1.5B for Hermes for Businesses
Nous Research confirmed on Wednesday that it raised a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation. Robot Ventures led, with Nvidia, Microsoft's M12, Samsung, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, Menlo Ventures and 1789 Capital participating. Total raised is now $158 million. TechCrunch had reported the round earlier and the company's own note, signed by CEO Dillon Rolnick, calls $90 million "modest in modern fundraising" and says the money goes to "the alternative: open, competitive, safer because of its auditability and not because of its gate-keepers."
The asset is Hermes Agent. Nous released it under MIT in February, and the company now says it has been cloned more than 24 million times and, by its own internal estimate, drives roughly 2.5% of all global token usage. That second number is the one investors bought. An agent harness that is free and open but routes a measurable slice of the world's inference is a distribution position, and Nous is explicit that the moat is "execution, trust, and extensibility," not the code. The Wall Street Journal reported about $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September with a target of $100 million by year end.
The product is Hermes for Businesses. The note describes it as the same self-improving agent, the one that writes reusable skills as it works and carries them across sessions, packaged so a company can pick models by price and goal, keep data private, and "build a corpus of intelligence bottoms-up." A business tier is already listed on the Nous portal. The pitch against the closed labs is cost control plus ownership of institutional knowledge, which is the same argument Mistral made with Large 4 the day before from the model side.
For a three-year-old group that started by fine-tuning Llama and publishing YaRN, this is the moment the open harness became a company. Watch whether the 2.5% figure gets an outside measurement, and whether Hermes for Businesses ships with the learning loop intact or as a locked-down enterprise fork.
Links: nousresearch.com/a-note-on-our-fundraise/, techcrunch.com/2026/10/07/nous-research-confirms-it-hit-1-5b-valuation-launches-ai-agents-for-business-users/
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The asset is Hermes Agent. Nous released it under MIT in February, and the company now says it has been cloned more than 24 million times and, by its own internal estimate, drives roughly 2.5% of all global token usage. That second number is the one investors bought. An agent harness that is free and open but routes a measurable slice of the world's inference is a distribution position, and Nous is explicit that the moat is "execution, trust, and extensibility," not the code. The Wall Street Journal reported about $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September with a target of $100 million by year end.
The product is Hermes for Businesses. The note describes it as the same self-improving agent, the one that writes reusable skills as it works and carries them across sessions, packaged so a company can pick models by price and goal, keep data private, and "build a corpus of intelligence bottoms-up." A business tier is already listed on the Nous portal. The pitch against the closed labs is cost control plus ownership of institutional knowledge, which is the same argument Mistral made with Large 4 the day before from the model side.
For a three-year-old group that started by fine-tuning Llama and publishing YaRN, this is the moment the open harness became a company. Watch whether the 2.5% figure gets an outside measurement, and whether Hermes for Businesses ships with the learning loop intact or as a locked-down enterprise fork.
Links: nousresearch.com/a-note-on-our-fundraise/, techcrunch.com/2026/10/07/nous-research-confirms-it-hit-1-5b-valuation-launches-ai-agents-for-business-users/
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