Nous Research Hermes Series B: $90M for Enterprise Push

An open-source AI agent cloned more than 24 million times is going after the enterprise market, and the Nous Research Hermes Series B is funding that push. According to reporting by TechCrunch, Nous Research has raised a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, confirming a round first whispered about in July and using the capital to launch Hermes for Businesses — an offering aimed at companies that want to run customizable AI agents on their own data without handing it to a closed platform.

The round, announced October 7, was led by Robot Ventures, with participation from Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung and 1789 Capital, according to TechCrunch. The financing brings the three-year-old startup's total funding to $158 million. For readers of this site, the Nous Research Hermes Series B continues a busy funding season for the agent economy — our earlier coverage of Rein Security's $25 million round for AI agent runtime security showed capital flowing into agent infrastructure, and the Nous Research Hermes Series B extends that flow to the open-source side of the ecosystem.

The deal behind the Nous Research Hermes Series B

Nous itself declined to name a valuation; the $1.5 billion figure was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, according to TechCrunch. Axios also named Robot Ventures as the lead investor. The company, founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium and Shivani Mitra, built its early reputation through open work on AI models and software, according to TechCrunch's July report.

CEO Dillon Rolnick framed the Nous Research Hermes Series B modestly in a note on the company's website, saying the team had consistently delivered more with less, according to an account by The Next Web cited in coverage of the announcement.

The investor lists vary slightly between outlets — TechCrunch's includes Menlo Ventures and 1789 Capital while the company's own account names Microsoft's M12 and Y Combinator among backers — but all accounts agree on the core of the Nous Research Hermes Series B: Robot Ventures led, Nvidia and Samsung participated, and the money is earmarked for the business push.

The commercial trajectory is what makes the Nous Research Hermes Series B more than a hype valuation. According to The Wall Street Journal, Nous was at roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026 and expects to pass $100 million before the end of the year. That is a company forecast, not audited revenue — but the reported acceleration suggests real paid adoption behind the open-source popularity.

What the Hermes agent actually does

Hermes is an open-source agent, not a single model. Released under the MIT license in February, it runs as a long-lived process on a server or the user's own infrastructure, connects to whichever language model the user chooses, and communicates through Slack, Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, a terminal or the Hermes Desktop app, according to an explainer by VantaSoft engineers who deploy it for customers.

What sets it apart is a built-in learning loop: it turns experience into reusable skills, keeps notes on what it learns and builds a model of the person it works for across sessions, the explainer reports. It is model-agnostic — working with Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI or the user's own endpoint — and the project describes running it on a $5 VPS or a GPU cluster alike. The Nous Research Hermes Series B capital will now be spent turning this developer tool into something IT departments can sign off on.

The numbers are striking for open software: the agent has been cloned more than 24 million times and, according to the company's own estimates cited by TechCrunch, drives roughly 2.5 percent of global AI token usage. For context, that is a measurable slice of the entire world's AI inference flowing through an MIT-licensed project maintained by a startup still in its third year.

Why open agents are chasing the enterprise

The monetization question is the most interesting part of the Nous Research Hermes Series B. Open-source projects can build enormous developer adoption without capturing much revenue, as TechStartups' coverage noted — Nous is trying to turn openness into distribution while charging companies for deployment, security, management and enterprise features around the agent. The stakes of getting agent safety right were visible this week too, as reported in our piece on Anthropic cutting agent internet access after reward hacking — enterprise buyers are watching the safety conversation closely.

The pattern is familiar in software: a community adopts the free tool, and the company sells the support, hosting and controls larger customers need. The risk, as Forbes Europe's coverage of the round put it, is that the free version competes with the paid one — the paid layer has to be clearly better. Hermes for Businesses answers that by promising companies customized agents for multi-step workflows that keep corporate data private and secure, according to the company's announcement.

The broader market is moving the same way. Personal and business AI agents drew enormous sums this year, The Next Web reported: Instinct raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation, and Meta launched its Muse agent in September. The Nous Research Hermes Series B is comparatively modest in that landscape — and that is exactly the company's pitch: an agent that developers already run on their own infrastructure, now wrapped in the enterprise features procurement teams require.

Whether developer enthusiasm translates into durable corporate spending is the open question the Nous Research Hermes Series B is paying to answer. But with 24 million clones and a $36 million revenue base, Nous enters the enterprise market with something most open-source startups never had: distribution already in hand.