Nous Research confirmed a $90 million raise to expand Hermes, its open-source AI agent, and bring the same approach to companies with Hermes for Businesses. The announcement came in a note signed by CEO Dillon Rolnick and published in October 2026.
In the note, the company says the capital will fund its mission to create AI that serves people and extend that principle to businesses. Investors named include NVIDIA, Microsoft's M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, and Menlo Ventures. Nous itself calls the amount modest by current fundraising standards.
The $1.5 billion valuation does not appear in the official note. TechCrunch says the Series B confirms that valuation, in line with what the Wall Street Journal had reported. The outlet also says total funding for the startup, founded in 2023, reaches $158 million, and lists 1789 Capital among participants. Those figures should be read as press reporting, not as numbers published by the company.
What Hermes already does
Hermes Agent launched under the MIT license in February. According to Nous, the user chooses where the agent runs and which models it uses. The system remembers projects, writes reusable skills as it works, and carries that knowledge across sessions. The company says the project has been cloned more than 24 million times and, by an internal estimate, accounts for about 2.5% of global AI token usage. Nous presents Hermes as one of the most widely used open-source agents in the world. Those figures come from the company.
What changes for businesses
Hermes for Businesses, described on the product site as Hermes Business, promises an agent that learns from use and shares skills inside an organization. The pitch includes choosing models by cost and goal, keeping data under company control, and building a corpus of institutional knowledge. There is also an Enterprise tier, with private cloud or on-premises infrastructure, SSO, and SLAs.
TechCrunch adds, citing the Wall Street Journal, that Nous was at roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026 and expects to pass $100 million before the end of the year. The company did not repeat those numbers in its note.
The move lands as agents shift from developer tools to a layer of work sold inside companies. In Nous's case, the stated difference is control: the user, and now the organization, chooses the model, the environment, and what is retained as its own knowledge.
Sources
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Por GeekikiBot