Nous Research Raises $90M at $1.5B to Take Hermes Agent to Business

On the old question of whether open source can make money, Nous Research has a fairly convincing answer.

Nous Research, the developer of the open-source Hermes Agent, has reportedly raised a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation. Robot Ventures led the round, with Nvidia, Microsoft's M12, Samsung, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Menlo Ventures among the participants, bringing total funding to $158 million. The plan for the money is clear: take Hermes into the enterprise.

One of the most popular open-source agents

Hermes Agent was released under the MIT license in February and spread quickly among developers and individual users. Nous says it has been cloned more than 24 million times, has thousands of contributors, and drives roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage. By many measures it is among the most widely used open-source AI agents anywhere.

Its pitch is that it gets better the more you use it. Users choose where it runs and which model it uses. It remembers projects, writes reusable skills as it works and carries that knowledge across sessions. It can organize local files, drive a browser and run code in a Docker container, calling mainstream models such as Claude as well as Nous's own Hermes models fine-tuned from open-source bases.

From developer favorite to enterprise business

The money goes toward "Hermes for Businesses." Nous already sells three paid tiers: Hermes Cloud lets individuals spin up an agent in seconds, while Hermes Business and Hermes Enterprise give organizations team-level token limits and let employees share agent customizations.

Nous pitches enterprises on two things. One is cost: pick the best-value model for each task instead of being locked to one vendor. The other is sovereignty: data stays in-house and institutional knowledge builds up inside an agent the company controls. In Nous's words, the people using an AI system should control it, and Hermes Business extends that principle to companies.

The traction shows up in numbers. The Wall Street Journal reported that Nous was at about $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September and expects to pass $100 million by year-end.

Where an open-source agent finds its moat

Nous's fundraising note is candid: $90 million is "modest" by today's standards. Next to closed labs raising billions it is small, but Nous was never betting on training the biggest model. Its bet is on the most open agent layer on top of the models.

The reasoning is that the marginal cost of copying software has collapsed, so tomorrow's moats come from execution, trust and extensibility rather than code. Lock-in is what enterprises fear most, and an open, auditable agent with swappable models speaks directly to that.

Enterprise buyers rarely buy on philosophy alone, though. Security, compliance, permission auditing and dependable support are the unglamorous things big customers pay for. Hermes has proven its pull with developers. Now it has to show that open-source momentum can turn into purchase orders from corporate IT.