Nous Research $1.5B Valuation Backs Hermes Agent Enterprise Push

What happened

Nous Research has confirmed a valuation that had been reported since the summer. On October 7, the open-source AI lab said it had closed a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation. It announced the round alongside Hermes for Businesses, a product that sells its free Hermes Agent to companies.1 Robot Ventures led the round. Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung and 1789 Capital also joined, which brings the three-year-old company's total funding to about $158 million.810

The valuation has been in circulation for months. In July, TechCrunch reported that Nous was in talks to raise at least $75 million at a $1.5 billion valuation.19 The final round was larger than that. Nous's Series A, a $50 million round led by Paradigm in April 2025, carried a token valuation of roughly $1 billion.1 So this round is a step up for an established company, not a sudden jump to unicorn status.

According to the company, Hermes for Businesses will let organizations pick models based on price and goal, keep their AI use private, and keep control of their institutional knowledge. Nous also says a mobile app is coming, with no release date.2

Where the coverage diverges

The reports agree on the main facts but differ on details, and those differences matter for anyone reading this as a market signal.

The valuation's source. Some outlets say Nous itself confirmed the valuation. Others point out that the company's fundraising note confirmed the $90 million but never stated a valuation. That figure came from the Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch.23 Nous's own post referred readers to the Journal's coverage and said the raise would take Hermes Agent "to new frontiers." It added, in parentheses, that the company would also build a mobile app.3 My reading is that Nous was happy to let the press number stand without putting its name to it. That's common practice, but it means "confirmed" here mostly means the company didn't dispute it.

The round size. One aggregated report, attributed to The Block, put the round at $75 million rather than $90 million.7 That matches the July figure and may reflect a first close. Most outlets, and the company's own note, use $90 million.3

The investor list. Coverage that draws on the company note names Microsoft's M12 and Y Combinator among the backers.27 Other reports list 1789 Capital instead.810 One outlet says 1789 Capital's role "draws scrutiny" because of its connection to Donald Trump Jr.3 For a company whose pitch is neutral, open infrastructure, that is a reputational detail that buyers may notice.

Leadership. The Next Web cites a note from chief executive Dillon Rolnick.7 A company profile database lists co-founder Jeffrey Quesnelle as CEO.6 In a June interview, Quesnelle was described as founder and CTO.18 The likeliest explanation is that leadership roles changed during the year, and some databases haven't caught up.

The numbers behind the price

The financial figures drew the most comment. Nous reported about $36 million in annualized revenue as of mid-September and says it expects to pass $100 million by year-end.7 One analysis worked out that the valuation is about 42 times current annualized revenue, and would fall to around 15 times if Nous hits the target. Revenue would have to nearly triple in under four months to get there. The same analysis noted that Nous hasn't said how much of its current revenue comes from enterprise contracts.8

The usage numbers are big but come with caveats. Nous says Hermes Agent has been cloned more than 24 million times and handles roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage. Both figures are the company's own estimates.57 Dealroom counts 22.7 million downloads, a little lower.8 Counts of GitHub stars vary: 214,000 in one report and about 219,000 in an engineering guide.817

OpenRouter offers an independent check. Its public app rankings list Hermes Agent at more than 53 trillion total tokens and as the top-ranked app, first in the productivity, coding agent, personal agent and CLI agent categories.20 That doesn't verify the 2.5% figure, but it does support the claim that Hermes is one of the most heavily used agent frameworks right now.

What Hermes Agent actually is

Hermes Agent has been publicly available since its February 2026 release, under the MIT license.1216 It's the agent framework that the new business offering is built on. It runs as a persistent process on a user's own server instead of in a browser tab. It keeps memory across sessions, and users can reach it through Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal or a terminal.15

Its main technical feature is what Nous calls a built-in learning loop. When the agent solves a problem, it can save the solution as a reusable skill, so the next similar task uses fewer tokens and goes faster.17 About 160 skills come bundled. They cover GitHub workflows, document handling, research and coding tasks, and the agent can write new ones for itself.15 The skills use an open, shareable format. One guide says the plugin system is compatible with the agentskills.io standard.1617

For tooling and integrations, the most relevant point is that Hermes doesn't try to be a closed system. It can connect to any Model Context Protocol server, and its web dashboard lets users manage MCP servers along with messaging channels, webhooks, memory and profiles.15 It works with any model provider. Users can choose from 300+ models through Nous Portal, OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter or self-hosted endpoints, and switch with a single command.15 It can also act as a local OpenAI-compatible proxy, so tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Aider and Cline can run through it.15 Execution is sandboxed by default, with backends that range from local Docker to Modal and Daytona. Subagents run as separate processes, each with its own terminal.17

Put together, Hermes is less a standalone product than a hub between models, MCP tools, skills and messaging platforms. That position matters as the agent market splits into protocol and marketplace layers. The company is already making money from the layer between the free agent and the models: Nous Portal sells tiered subscriptions with bundled model and tool credits.17 Hosted plans reportedly cost $20 to $200 a month.1 In a June interview, Quesnelle described the subscriptions as access to a broad model marketplace and premium APIs. He still encouraged users to run local hardware where they can.18

Why the enterprise bet is plausible, and where it could fail

Commentators broadly agree that Nous is betting against how OpenAI and Anthropic sell agents: as products wrapped around closed models that customers can't inspect or run themselves.1 One outlet compares it to the Red Hat model, where the core software is free and customers pay for support, compliance tooling and private infrastructure.1 Another describes the pitch as contrarian: an open-weight vendor may earn more trust from procurement teams than one that keeps everything behind an API.3

I think that argument holds up better than the valuation does. The case for open agents in enterprises is about trust: auditable code, data kept on the customer's systems, no vendor lock-in. One unofficial community site reports that Nous had already introduced Hermes Business in September, a shared Portal account with per-member spending caps. It also describes Hermes Enterprise, a version that runs entirely on a customer's own infrastructure.19 If that's accurate, Hermes for Businesses builds on packaging that already exists and isn't a brand-new product.

The weak points are just as clear. Closed platforms have had more time to build compliance certifications, support teams and integration ecosystems, and buyers will compare that maturity against open-weight flexibility.3 Renascence argued that selling agents to non-technical teams is as much a service-design problem as a technical one, because an agent is only as good as the workflow and governance around it.4 And Nous still has to show that companies will pay for something they can partly run for free.8

The investor list suggests where support could come from. Nvidia and Samsung make the hardware that agent workloads run on, so both benefit from a widely used open agent.8 Quesnelle has also mentioned Nous's work with Nvidia's Nemotron coalition on open model development.18

The takeaway

The funding mostly confirms what was already known. The real development is that Hermes Agent, the most-used open-source agent framework by OpenRouter's count, now has a company behind it that is selling to businesses.20 It is built around MCP, portable skills and swappable models, which makes it a practical reference design for an open agent stack.1517 Whether that is worth $1.5 billion depends on one figure: the jump from $36 million to $100 million in annualized revenue that Nous expects by the end of the year.7 The first-quarter numbers from Hermes for Businesses will matter more than the funding round.