The round
Nous Research confirmed a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation on 7 October, TechCrunch reported, putting a number on reporting the publication first ran in July. Robot Ventures led. Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung and 1789 Capital — where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner — also took part.
The company is three years old and has now raised $158 million in total.
The product
The money comes with a commercial product. Hermes for Businesses lets companies deploy customised AI agents that handle multi-step workflows while keeping their data private, which is the standard enterprise pitch and the standard enterprise objection answered in one sentence.
Underneath it is the Hermes Agent, which Nous publishes openly. The company says it has been cloned more than 24 million times and accounts for roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage. That second figure is the company’s own estimate and there is no independent measure of global token consumption to check it against, so it should be read as a claim rather than a statistic.
On revenue, TechCrunch cites the Wall Street Journal: about $36 million annualised by mid-September 2026, with a target of passing $100 million by the end of the year.
Why the open base matters
An open agent that other people run is a strange asset. It cannot be metered, and most of the 24 million clones will never pay anything. What it buys is distribution and defaults — the agent people already have running when they start looking for the paid version with support, policy controls and a contract behind it.
There is a concrete sign of that this week. Microsoft, announcing general availability of its Execution Containers sandbox for AI agents, listed “Hermes Agent by Nous Research” among the agents due to support it, alongside Anthropic’s Claude Code, Perplexity, Manus and Raycast. That list is not revenue, but it is the set of agents an operating system vendor expects to find running on corporate machines.
What to watch
Whether the $100 million target lands, and what the mix looks like when it does. A company at $36 million annualised in September that wants to triple by December is either closing large enterprise contracts or discounting, and the difference will show up in the next round rather than in this announcement.
Also worth watching: whether Nous keeps publishing the base agent openly once the paid product has enterprise customers with support obligations. That is the point at which open-weight strategies usually get revisited.
