- Nous Research has raised a $90M Series B led by Robot Ventures, taking its total to $158M.
- The Wall Street Journal reports a $1.5B valuation and about $36M in annualised revenue.
- The money will fund Hermes for Businesses, an enterprise version of its open-source agent.
Nous Research has raised $90 million in Series B funding, giving the maker of the free, open-source Hermes Agent the money to sell to businesses. The Wall Street Journal reported a $1.5 billion valuation. Nous did not state a valuation itself.
Robot Ventures led the round. Nous named Nvidia, Microsoft’s venture arm M12, Samsung, Y Combinator, Union Square Ventures, and Menlo Ventures among the other backers.
TechCrunch reported that 1789 Capital, the firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner, also took part, and put total funding at $158 million. A $50 million Series A led by Paradigm came in April 2025. In July,
From open-source experiment to business platform
Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra founded Nous in 2023. It first made its name fine-tuning Meta’s Llama models and publishing open research, then released Hermes Agent under the permissive MIT licence in February 2026.
Hermes keeps memory across sessions, writes reusable skills as it works, searches the web, runs code, and handles scheduled tasks, according to its documentation. Users can run it themselves or pay for hosted plans costing $20 to $200 a month.
Nous says Hermes has been cloned more than 24 million times and, by its own internal estimates, drives about 2.5% of global AI token usage. Tokens are the small chunks of text models read and write. The Journal counted more than 22 million downloads.
The funding goes to Hermes for Businesses, which Nous says will let companies choose models by price and goal, keep their AI use private, and own their institutional knowledge. A mobile app is also planned, with no release date given.
The enterprise agent race
Hermes arrived weeks after OpenClaw, the open-source agent TechCrunch calls its direct rival. OpenAI hired OpenClaw’s creator in February, and TNW reports that Nvidia, a Nous investor, has built an enterprise platform on OpenClaw. OpenAI and Anthropic also sell closed agent products to the same buyers.
The market is large. Grand View Research estimates AI agents were worth $7.6 billion in 2025 and will reach $182.9 billion by 2033, a compound annual growth rate of 49.6% from 2026. Enterprise agentic AI alone should grow from $5.3 billion in 2026 to $24.5 billion by 2030, it says.
Other startups are targeting pieces of it. Dust raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Abstract and Sequoia in May, for a workspace where people and agents share context. Bespoke Labs raised $40 million across seed and Series A rounds, with Wing VC leading the Series A, to build simulated company environments where agents practise long tasks. Berlin-based telli raised $15 million in seed funding led by redalpine in July for agents that handle customer conversations by voice, WhatsApp, chat, and email. Stuut, which counts M12 among its backers, raised a $52.5 million Series B on October 7 for agents that chase unpaid invoices.
Can free software become a business?
Control is also where buyers get nervous. Palma.ai chief executive Patrick Eden argued in TFN Prime that the riskiest AI in a company may be the agent that already holds its credentials.
Nous is saying that companies will pay for governance and private deployment around software anyone can download and inspect. A $36 million run rate suggests some already do. The harder test is whether firms that can run Hermes for free will pay Nous to run it for them.
