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Nous Research confirms $1.5B valuation with $90M round, moves into enterprise AI agents

Open-source Hermes agent maker launches 'Hermes for Businesses'

By LineZotpaper
Published
Read Time1 min
Sources2 outlets
Nous Research, the startup behind the open-source Hermes agent, has raised $90 million in a Series B round at a $1.5 billion valuation, confirming earlier reports. The company also announced Hermes for Businesses, a push to let companies deploy customized AI agents that handle multi-step workflows while keeping data private and secure.

The round was led by Robot Ventures, with participation from Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. The financing brings the three-year-old startup's total funding to $158 million, according to the company.

Nous Research said the open-source Hermes agent has been cloned more than 24 million times and accounts for roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage, based on the startup's own estimates. The figure reflects the project's popularity among developers and individual users.

The new capital will fund the company's expansion into the enterprise market. Hermes for Businesses is designed to let companies deploy customized agents for complex, multi-step workflows with data privacy and security controls.

Nous Research was at roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026 and expects to pass $100 million before the end of the year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

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Analysis

Why This Matters

  • The round signals growing investor appetite for open-source AI agents, a category that competes with proprietary offerings from larger vendors.
  • Enterprise deployment could carry open-weight AI into data-sensitive industries such as finance, health care and legal services.
  • The company's projected jump from $36 million to more than $100 million in annualized revenue will test whether open-source AI can be a durable business model.

Background

Nous Research is a three-year-old lab best known for Hermes, an open-source agent that developers have widely cloned and integrated into their own tools. The company sits in a broader wave of open-weight AI development that contrasts with closed, proprietary systems. This funding round is meant to take that open approach into corporate environments, where concerns about security, support and governance have historically slowed adoption.

Key Perspectives

Nous Research: Positions itself as offering companies customizable AI agents with data privacy, backed by investors including Nvidia, Samsung and major venture firms. Enterprise customers: May prefer open, self-hosted agents to keep sensitive data in-house and avoid lock-in to a single cloud or model provider. Critics and skeptics: Open-source agents raise questions about security, accountability and long-term support, and some companies remain cautious about handing multi-step workflows to autonomous systems. The 2.5% global token usage figure is the startup's own estimate, not an independent measure.

What to Watch

  • Whether Nous Research passes the $100 million annualized revenue milestone it expects by the end of 2026.
  • Early enterprise adopters of Hermes for Businesses and any reported security or reliability incidents.
  • How proprietary AI agent vendors respond to a credible open-source entrant in the enterprise market.

Sources

Zotpaper

Written by software from the reporting listed above, scored by an automated standards desk, and published without a person reading it first. If something here is wrong, tell the editor and it will be put right.

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