Nous Research, the startup behind the open-source Hermes Agent, has raised a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, TechCrunch’s Marina Temkin reported on Oct. 7. The announcement confirmed TechCrunch’s earlier reporting on the round, which Robot Ventures led.
Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung and 1789 Capital also invested, according to TechCrunch, which noted that Donald Trump Jr. is a partner at 1789. SiliconANGLE’s Maria Deutscher reported that Y Combinator joined as well. Sidley Austin, the law firm that represented Nous, also listed Microsoft among the participants.
The round brings the three-year-old company’s total funding to $158 million, TechCrunch reported.
How widely Hermes is used
Nous released Hermes in February under an open-source license, according to SiliconANGLE. TechCrunch reported that it has been cloned more than 24 million times, while SiliconANGLE described the same figure as downloads and said the project has several thousand open-source contributors.
Nous estimates Hermes drives about 2.5% of global AI token usage. Tokens are the chunks of text that AI models process, so the figure is a rough measure of how much model computing the agent consumes. These are the startup’s own estimates.
Hermes ships as a desktop app that can work with a user’s files and the programs on their machine, SiliconANGLE reported. It can browse the web for data and run code in a Docker container, an isolated software package.
The agent can use outside models such as Claude, along with Nous’s own Hermes 4 models, which are tuned versions of open-source models, according to SiliconANGLE. A router sends each prompt to the model best suited for it, weighing factors such as inference cost and speed.
Nous built the Hermes 4 models with a training set of 5 million synthetically generated records, about two-thirds of them aimed at improving reasoning, SiliconANGLE reported. The company generated that data with its own tool, called DataForge. Users can also connect Hermes to an outside database so it remembers preferences and project details across sessions.
The business push
Nous plans to use the money to sell to companies through Hermes for Businesses, which lets them deploy customized agents for multi-step work while keeping their data private, TechCrunch reported.
SiliconANGLE described three paid editions. Hermes Cloud lets consumers launch agents in seconds without setting up servers. Hermes Business and Hermes Enterprise let administrators set token limits for teams and let employees share agent setups with colleagues.
Nous was at about $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September and expects to pass $100 million before the end of 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported, as cited by both TechCrunch and SiliconANGLE. The company hasn’t published its own revenue figures.
The Sidley team on the deal was led by partners Lilya Tessler and Graeme Waller, according to the firm. Sidley described Hermes Agent as an assistant designed to give users “greater control over their data and AI systems.”
Source: TechCrunch, Marina Temkin, “Nous Research confirms it hit $1.5B valuation, launches AI agents for business users”
Additional sources: SiliconANGLE, Maria Deutscher, “Nvidia, Samsung back $90M round for AI agent startup Nous Research”; Sidley Austin, Sidley Austin LLP, “Sidley Represents Nous Research in US$90 Million Series B Financing”
