Nous Research Raises $90M for Hermes Enterprise Push

Nous Research already gave developers an AI agent they could clone, inspect, and run on their own infrastructure. The Series B is financing the less romantic part of that promise: proving an open agent can survive enterprise security reviews, procurement, support obligations, and production accountability.

Nous Research has raised a $90M Series B at a reported $1.5B valuation to cross that line with Hermes for Businesses. Robot Ventures led the financing, which brings major strategic and venture investors into Nous's effort to turn an open-source agent into an enterprise operating system without rebuilding the lock-in that open software was supposed to escape.

What Nous Research Announced

Nous announced the financing on October 7, 2026. The company named NVIDIA, Microsoft's M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, and Menlo Ventures among the investors. TechCrunch and Axios also reported 1789 Capital as a participant, while both outlets identified Robot Ventures as the lead.

The Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch place the Series B valuation at $1.5B. TechCrunch reports that the round brings total funding to $158M, but earlier reporting put pre-round funding at $70M. Because those figures do not reconcile exactly with the new $90M, the $158M cumulative figure should be treated as reported rather than independently reconstructed.

From Open Models to an Enterprise Agent

Nous Research was formed in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra. CEO Dillon Rolnick signed the company's funding note, which describes a strategy built around post-training, synthetic data, open-source tool use, long-context research, and AI systems that remain responsive to the people operating them.

That work eventually produced Hermes Agent, an MIT-licensed agent released in February 2026. Hermes can run on infrastructure selected by the user, work with different models, remember projects, create reusable skills, and carry knowledge across sessions. Nous says Hermes has been cloned more than 24M times and accounts for roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage by its internal estimate. Those figures are not independently audited, but they show the distribution base Nous is bringing into this financing.

Why Hermes for Businesses Changes the Assignment

Developer adoption proves that people will experiment with an open agent. Enterprise adoption asks a different set of questions. A business needs to know where data travels, which models can be approved, who controls access, how memory is governed, how actions are audited, what happens during an incident, and whether the system can move without taking the company's accumulated knowledge hostage.

Hermes for Businesses is Nous's answer. The company says organizations will be able to customize agents, choose models based on cost and performance, retain control of their intelligence stacks, and scale AI use privately. That promise gives buyers a strategic alternative to a single closed platform, but it also makes Nous responsible for the operational layer around the open project.

The company's current hiring makes the work concrete. Nous is recruiting across security, infrastructure, forward-deployed engineering, product management for Hermes Business, support, product analytics, and mobile development. An open-source repository can earn trust through code and community. An enterprise supplier also earns it through deployment discipline, response time, permissions, documentation, and the person who answers when the system stops behaving like the demo.

The Commercial Signal Behind the Round

The funding arrives with evidence that Nous has already converted some attention into revenue. TechCrunch, citing the Wall Street Journal, reported roughly $36M in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026. The company expected to pass $100M before year-end, though that is a forward-looking target and should not be treated as achieved performance.

The more important signal is the shape of the investor group. Robot Ventures led a round that also includes infrastructure and platform companies such as NVIDIA, Microsoft through M12, and Samsung alongside venture firms with different technology and market networks. Their involvement does not prove enterprise adoption, but it places capital and strategic relationships around Nous at the moment the company is packaging Hermes for business buyers.

Open Source Meets Procurement

Nous's central argument is that AI can become more trustworthy through auditability, competition, user control, and the ability to choose infrastructure and models. That position has obvious appeal as companies try to avoid handing their workflows, data, and institutional memory to one provider. It also becomes more demanding when buyers expect security reviews, compliance controls, integration support, service commitments, and clear accountability.

This is where the Series B matters beyond the valuation. The capital gives Nous room to build the managed layer that enterprises require while keeping the underlying agent open and portable. The company must make convenience compatible with control, because most business users will not maintain an agent stack from source just to preserve philosophical purity.

What the $90M Must Prove

Nous has already shown that an open agent can travel quickly through a developer community. The next phase is about whether that distribution can become a durable enterprise business without sanding away the properties that made Hermes different.

The answer will emerge in ordinary operating details: how quickly customers deploy, whether security teams approve the architecture, how model choice works in practice, what support looks like during an incident, and whether an organization's accumulated intelligence remains portable. Nous built its reputation by giving users more control. The enterprise chapter now depends on how much of that control survives contact with procurement and production.