Nous Research raises $90M Series B for Hermes Agent

Nous Research, the lab behind the open-source Hermes Agent, raised $90 million in a Series B round announced on October 7, 2026. The Wall Street Journal reported a $1.5 billion valuation. The money will build Hermes for Businesses, a version for companies, while the core agent stays free and open source.

The round

Nous Research's own note confirms the $90 million and lists its backers. They are NVIDIA, Microsoft's venture fund M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Menlo Ventures, among others. The note does not name a lead investor or give a valuation.

Other reports fill in some gaps, and they do not all agree:

Detail	What was reported	Reported by
Lead investor	Robot Ventures	Trending Topics, Crypto Briefing
Valuation	$1.5 billion	The Wall Street Journal, via The Next Web and Trending Topics
Series A	$50 million, led by Paradigm, April 2025	Crypto Briefing
Total raised	About $160 million	Crypto Briefing, Trending Topics

Nous was founded in 2023. According to The Next Web, it began by fine-tuning Meta's Llama models. It also published YaRN, a method that lets a model handle longer inputs. Its chief executive is Dillon Rolnick.

What Hermes Agent is

An AI agent is a program that uses a language model to carry out tasks on its own, such as editing files or searching the web. Nous released Hermes Agent under the MIT license in February 2026. That license lets anyone use, change and resell the code.

The Next Web says Hermes remembers a user's projects, writes reusable skills for itself and lets users pick which model runs it. It works on macOS, Windows and Linux, and through chat apps such as Telegram, Slack and WhatsApp.

Usage is described in three ways, and they measure different things:

• Clones: Nous says Hermes Agent has been cloned more than 24 million times.
• Downloads: The Wall Street Journal counted more than 22 million downloads since February, according to The Next Web.
• Token share: Nous estimates that Hermes handles about 2.5% of all global token usage. A token is a small chunk of text a model reads or writes. The figure is the company's internal estimate.

Hermes for Businesses

The money funds Hermes for Businesses, The Next Web reports. Nous's note says it will let companies choose models by price and goal, use AI privately and manage their own company knowledge.

Crypto Briefing reports that planned features include single sign-on, detailed audit logs and workspace controls. It adds that the product will stay open source and that some funds will go to a mobile app.

Trending Topics describes the business model as open core. The software stays open, and companies pay for hosting, security, management and support. It puts hosted pricing at $20 to $200 a month.

Rolnick framed the raise around openness. "We're building for everyone to own their intelligence, and we're doing it in the open," he wrote in the company's note.

Revenue and rivals

Trending Topics, citing the company, reports annualized revenue of $36 million in mid-September. Nous expects more than $100 million by the end of the year, which is its own forecast, not a result.

Trending Topics names OpenClaw as a direct competitor, along with Cognition's Devin, Replit and Mistral AI. Hermes also appears in Microsoft's agent plans. When Microsoft made its MXC agent sandbox generally available on October 7, it listed Hermes Agent among the tools that will add support later.

What this means for developers

For teams that already run Hermes Agent, or are weighing it, the round changes a few practical things:

• The free version is not going away. The code is MIT-licensed, so a team can keep running, auditing or forking it whatever the company does next.
• Wait for the admin features. Single sign-on and audit logs are often what an IT team needs before approving a tool. Until Hermes for Businesses ships them, a company-wide rollout lacks those controls.
• Budget for two bills. Hermes lets users pick the model, so the model cost depends on the provider a team chooses. Hosting, at $20 to $200 a month per Trending Topics, would come on top of that.
• Limit what the agent can touch. An agent that edits files and runs commands needs boundaries. Hermes support for Microsoft's MXC sandbox is announced but not yet available, so run Hermes under an account with limited access for now.
• Watch the split between free and paid. Nous expects revenue above $100 million by year-end, up from a $36 million annual rate in mid-September. Check which new features land in the open-source edition and which stay in the paid one.