Nous Research Raises $90M Series B at $1.5B to Sell Hermes Agents

The $1.5 billion valuation is now official

In July, Nous Research's $1.5 billion valuation was only a rumor. As of October 7 it is a closed deal. The open-source AI lab behind the Hermes agent announced a $90 million Series B at that valuation. It also launched Hermes for Businesses, a push to sell its agent to corporate customers.1112 Robot Ventures led the round. Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Samsung also took part.1216

The company was founded in 2023, and its total funding now stands at about $158 million.15 Some outlets round that figure to roughly $160 million.23 The more important change is in what the money pays for. A lab known for releasing open model weights and running experimental decentralized training now says it is building an enterprise software company. Its rivals for those customers include OpenAI and Anthropic.

How the round grew from $75 million to $90 million

The deal took about three months to come together in public. In mid-July, TechCrunch reported that Nous was close to raising at least $75 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Robot Ventures with Union Square Ventures participating.5 At the time, Nous declined to comment and the investors did not respond. Early coverage noted the gaps: no revenue figure, no count of paying subscribers, and no confirmation that the round had closed.48

The final round was $15 million larger than the reported floor, at the same valuation.311 Raising more money without raising the price suggests that investor demand was stronger than the summer reports indicated. A falling-back round would have looked very different.

The jump from the previous round is real, though less dramatic than a three-year-old company reaching unicorn status might suggest. Paradigm led Nous's $50 million Series A in April 2025. That round valued the company's yet-to-launch token at $1 billion.58 It was part of a roughly $70 million package of equity and SAFT funding. A SAFT, or Simple Agreement for Future Tokens, gives investors rights to tokens a project expects to issue later.2 Going from a $1 billion token valuation to a $1.5 billion equity valuation is a 50% step-up. It also signals a shift from a crypto-funded story to a more conventional venture story.

Where the reports disagree

The reports differ on a few details.

Who confirmed the valuation. TechCrunch's headline said Nous had confirmed the $1.5 billion figure.18 But several outlets point out that the company's own fundraising note gave the $90 million amount without stating a valuation. They attribute the $1.5 billion number to The Wall Street Journal.713 Nous did publicly acknowledge the Journal's report, saying it had raised a Series B to take Hermes Agent further and build a mobile app.12 The fairest reading is that the valuation is reported and not disputed, but Nous has not put the number in its own words.

Who invested. CEO Dillon Rolnick's note named Microsoft's venture arm M12 and Y Combinator as backers, along with the firms listed above.79 TechCrunch also reported that 1789 Capital took part. Donald Trump Jr. is a partner at that firm.9 Nous's own announcement does not address the political side of that investment.12 The company described the raise as an effort to build AI that "serves the people." One outlet noted that this message sits uneasily with an investor list that includes Nvidia, Samsung and a firm tied to the president's family.12

Adoption numbers. Nous says Hermes has been cloned more than 24 million times and, by its own internal estimates, accounts for about 2.5% of global AI token usage.715 The Journal counted about 22.7 million downloads since the agent's February release.37 No one has independently checked the token-share figure.11 Some reports use the company's numbers without saying where they came from, so readers should treat them as Nous's own claims.

What Hermes is, and what businesses would pay for

Hermes Agent was released under the permissive MIT license in February 2026. It remembers context across sessions, writes reusable skills as it works, searches the web, runs code and handles scheduled tasks.9 Users can run it themselves for free or pay $20 to $200 a month for a hosted version.311 Over the summer the project had about 214,000 GitHub stars and nearly 40,000 forks.48

The new business products are a familiar open-core play. According to one report, the business tiers first appeared in mid-September. Hermes Business gives a company's Nous Portal account a shared credit balance with spending caps for each employee. It also adds a shared library where skills written by staff build up into internal tooling the company owns.11 Hermes Enterprise lets customers run the whole stack on their own infrastructure or private cloud, with single sign-on and access controls for compliance.11 Nous's pitch emphasizes three points: choosing models by price and goal, keeping AI usage private, and keeping ownership of institutional knowledge.13 A mobile app is also planned, though no release date has been given.9

The model is the one Red Hat used for Linux: give away the software and charge for support, governance and private deployment.11 The difficult question is whether companies that can run Hermes for free will pay Nous to run it for them.9

Revenue changes the case for the valuation

Revenue is the clearest difference between the July and October reports. In July, the main criticism was that Nous was being valued on GitHub popularity and a small hosted business, with no revenue disclosed.4 Now the Journal reports that annualized revenue was about $36 million in mid-September, and the company told TechCrunch it expects to pass $100 million by year-end.1117

If the current $36 million figure holds up, the valuation is about 40 times run-rate revenue. That is expensive but not unusual for a fast-growing AI company. If Nous really reaches $100 million by December, the multiple falls to about 15 times, which would make the price look cautious. The forecast is the company's own and has not been tested.3 One report argued that the revenue figures matter more than the funding itself, because they show real paid usage and not just developer enthusiasm.11 That argument is persuasive, with one caveat: a projection that nearly triples revenue in about three and a half months deserves skepticism until it is reported as achieved.

The competitors

Nous is entering a crowded market for AI agents. Hermes launched weeks after OpenClaw, the open-source agent that TechCrunch calls its direct rival.59 OpenAI hired OpenClaw's creator in February. TNW reports that Nvidia, now a Nous investor, has built an enterprise platform on OpenClaw.9 So one of Nous's most prominent backers is also supporting a competing open agent, which reads more like Nvidia placing several bets than a vote of confidence in Hermes alone. OpenAI and Anthropic, meanwhile, sell closed agent products to the same corporate buyers.9

Nous's argument is that some enterprises want an agent they can inspect, host themselves and keep away from a vendor's servers.11 Closed platforms still have an advantage in compliance certifications, support teams and integrations, all of which Nous will have to build.12

The Psyche network

The Psyche network gets less attention in the coverage but is part of the bet. It coordinates GPUs spread across the internet and uses Solana to handle that coordination.11 Nous's Hermes 4.3 model, a 36-billion-parameter system, was the first it fully post-trained on Psyche.8 Before the agent's success, Nous attracted crypto investors such as Paradigm, and summer coverage asked how much of its valuation came from that decentralized-infrastructure story.8 The October announcement is mostly about selling to businesses, which suggests the crypto angle now matters less to the company's case than enterprise sales do.

Analysis: what the round shows about the market

The Nous round fits a wider trend in AI venture capital. Investors are funding several layers of the stack instead of one winning model lab, and agent companies that build on top of model weights are drawing large rounds.12 In July, the same week Nous's talks were first reported, River AI closed $1.1 billion at a $5 billion valuation.4

Nous now has a confirmed unicorn price, a growing list of strategic investors and reported revenue to point to. What it still needs to show is that free, open software can win enterprise contracts as the closed platforms move for the same customers. By that test, this round mainly buys Nous time to prove its open-core model can work at scale.