Nous Research raises $90M at $1.5B valuation to take Hermes Agent to businesses

What's the deal? Nous Research, the developer of the open-source Hermes Agent, has raised $90 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, The Wall Street Journal reported on 7 October 2026. Robot VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → led the Series B, with Nvidia, Microsoft's M12, Samsung, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Menlo Ventures among the backers, according to a note from CEO Dillon Rolnick on the company's website. The company did not disclose the valuation itself.

Traction: Hermes Agent, released under the MIT licence in February 2026, has been downloaded 22.7 million times according to the WSJ; Nous says it has been cloned more than 24 million times and, by its internal estimates, drives about 2.5% of global token usage. Nous was at roughly $36 million in annualised revenue by mid-September 2026 and expects to pass $100 million before the end of 2026, the WSJ reported.

What's the plan? The money goes into Hermes for Businesses, an enterprise version of the agent that lets companies pick models by price and goal, keep their AI use private and own their institutional knowledge. Hermes remembers projects, writes reusable skills as it works and runs locally or in the cloud on macOS, Windows and Linux, as well as through apps such as Telegram, Slack and WhatsApp.

Background: Nous was founded in 2023 to push back against centralised, closed AI. It began by fine-tuning Meta's Llama models for user alignment, worked on synthetic data and open-source tool calling, and published YaRN, a method for extending open models' context windows at low cost. The round brings total funding to about $158 million, following a $50 million Series A led by Paradigm in April 2025.

Read more: The Wall Street Journal · Nous Research · The Next Web