Nous Research raises $90M to take its open-source Hermes agent into business

Why it matters

The round tests whether an open-source agent can support a paid enterprise business built around deployment, privacy and administration. The Series B funds that effort; GitHub interest alone does not establish customer demand.

Nous Research has raised a $90 million Series B to expand Hermes Agent for business customers and build a mobile app, the company said on October 7th. The financing values Nous at $1.5 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal's report.

The round backs a company founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan "Teknium" and Shivani Mitra, according to TechCrunch's July report. Nous's public account named NVIDIA, Microsoft's M12, Samsung Next, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Menlo Ventures among the investors. Axios reported Robot Ventures led the round. The company's announcement did not break out individual check sizes.

Nous's founders built their early reputation through open work on AI models and software. In a note accompanying the financing, CEO Dillon Rolnick (@dillonrolnick) described Nous as a team that began with few resources and built in public. The company says it formed to resist the concentration of AI behind closed products, and that its early work fine-tuned Meta's Llama models to better reflect individual users' preferences. The funding will test whether Nous can sell paid services around software that people can also run and inspect themselves.

Hermes is an open-source agent, not a single model. Its documentation describes persistent memory, reusable skills, web search, code execution, scheduled tasks and connections to messaging platforms and other tools. The GitHub repository carries an MIT license. Users can run the agent on their own computers or servers; Nous also offers hosted model access, tools and cloud hosting through Nous Portal.

Its business offering pitches team-level controls, shared skills, model choice and private or on-premises deployment, with enterprise services including single sign-on and service-level agreements. Portal's public subscription page lists individual plans at $20, $100 and $200 per month, alongside a free tier. Those consumer plans are distinct from the tailored enterprise deployment Nous is now positioning for businesses.

The strategy follows Hermes's rapid adoption among developers. TechCrunch reported in July that the project had roughly 214,000 GitHub stars and nearly 40,000 forks at that time. Those counts measure visible developer interest, not paying customers or enterprise use. The financing announcement does not put a revenue or customer figure alongside them.

Nous had raised about $70 million before this round, according to TechCrunch, which reported in July that Robot Ventures and Union Square Ventures were involved in a financing then being assembled at a $1.5 billion valuation. The completed $90 million round confirms that financing and increases the reported amount. The mobile app is another planned expansion; the company has not described its release timing in the announcement.

The commercial challenge is translating Hermes's flexibility into something companies will pay to operate and govern. Nous's business pitch centers on keeping company data inside customer-controlled infrastructure and letting organizations manage models and shared knowledge. The company can sell deployment and administration for the open agent without making its core software proprietary. The Series B funds that approach; whether business customers adopt it at scale will determine how much the developer following is worth as a business.