Nous Research says it raised $90M Series B to expand Hermes

What did Nous Research announce?

Nous Research said on October 7, 2026, that it was announcing a $90 million Series B funding round. The company said the capital will support its open AI development and Hermes for Businesses, an enterprise version of its open-source agent.

TechCrunch reported that the round valued Nous Research at $1.5 billion, while Tech Funding News said the financing would fund Hermes for Businesses. TechCrunch also said the new financing brought Nous Research’s total funding to $158 million.

Who backed the round?

Robot Ventures led the Series B, according to TechCrunch, Ground News’ aggregation, Tech Funding News, and SiliconANGLE. Nous Research’s fundraising note listed NVIDIA, Microsoft’s M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, and Menlo Ventures among its investors, while TechCrunch separately reported participation from 1789 Capital.

What is Hermes, and why is Nous pushing it into businesses?

Hermes is the company’s open-source AI agent, which Nous Research said it released in February 2026 under an MIT license. The startup says users can choose where Hermes runs and which models it uses, while retaining project knowledge and reusable skills across sessions.

According to Nous Research, Hermes has been cloned more than 24 million times, and its internal estimate puts the product at about 2.5% of global token usage. The company also described Hermes as, by many metrics, the most widely used open-source AI agent in the world.

The business push is centered on Hermes for Businesses, which Nous says is meant to help companies build and own their intelligence stacks. The company said the offering will let customers choose models based on price and goals, use AI at scale safely and privately, and preserve institutional knowledge through a bottoms-up corpus of intelligence. TechCrunch reported the product is designed to let companies deploy customized AI agents for multi-step workflows while keeping data private and secure.

Tech Funding News reported that Hermes can keep memory across sessions, write reusable skills, search the web, run code, and handle scheduled tasks, according to its documentation. SiliconANGLE said Hermes also ships as a desktop app that can interact with a user’s files and browse the web, and that it uses popular large language models such as Claude alongside Nous-developed models.

What happens next for Nous Research?

Nous Research said it will use the new funding to build and deliver Hermes for Businesses and expand it into new domains. SiliconANGLE reported the company plans to expand adoption of Hermes’ business editions, while Tech Funding News said a mobile app is planned, though no release date was disclosed.

SiliconANGLE reported that Nous monetizes Hermes through three paid editions: Hermes Cloud, Hermes Business and Hermes Enterprise. The outlet said Hermes Cloud lets consumers launch agents in a few seconds without setting up infrastructure, while Business and Enterprise let administrators set token-use limits and let users share customizations with colleagues.

The startup’s fundraising note said it formed in 2023, and Tech Funding News reported that founders Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium and Shivani Mitra launched the company that year. Tech Funding News also reported that Nous previously raised a $50 million Series A led by Paradigm in April 2025.

TechCrunch, citing The Wall Street Journal, reported that Nous was at roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September and expected to pass $100 million before the end of 2026.