Nous Research Confirms a $90 Million Series B at a $1.5 Billion Valuation - and Starts Selling Its Open Agent to Companies

Nous Research confirmed on Wednesday that it closed a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, pairing the round with the launch of Hermes for Businesses, a push to sell its open-source Hermes agent directly to companies. Robot Ventures led the round, with Nvidia, Samsung, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures and 1789 Capital participating; some reports also list Microsoft's M12 and Y Combinator among the investors. Total funding now stands at about $158 million.

The round had a long public runway. TechCrunch reported in July that Nous was in talks to raise at least $75 million at the same $1.5 billion valuation; The Wall Street Journal reported the final, larger round. In a note signed by CEO Dillon Rolnick, the company called $90 million "modest in modern fundraising" and framed the bet as backing "the alternative: open, competitive, safer because of its auditability and not because of its gate-keepers."

The asset behind the raise is Hermes Agent, released under an MIT license in February. The company describes it as an agent that keeps persistent memory across sessions, runs scheduled tasks on its own and writes new skills for itself as it works. It is free to self-host, and Nous sells hosted tiers from $20 to $200 a month.

The business packaging rolled out in mid-September. Hermes Business gives a company's portal account one shared credit balance with per-member spending caps plus a shared library where employees' self-written skills accumulate. Hermes Enterprise goes further, letting a company run the whole stack on its own infrastructure or private cloud with single sign-on and compliance-oriented access controls. Nous says Enterprise is already running inside some of the world's largest companies, though it has not named them.

The traction numbers are company-reported and worth treating as such: Hermes has been cloned more than 24 million times and, by Nous's own internal estimate, drives roughly 2.5 percent of all global token usage. More concrete is revenue - The Wall Street Journal reported about $36 million annualized by mid-September, and the company told TechCrunch it expects to clear $100 million by the end of the year. That is real paying usage behind a free, open project.

Nous Research was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium and Shivani Mitra, and built its reputation on open-weight models and decentralized infrastructure - its Psyche network coordinates GPUs scattered across the internet for training, with the coordination layer settled on Solana. It raised a $50 million Series A led by Paradigm in April 2025 at a roughly $1 billion valuation.

What the round really tests is the open-agent wedge into the enterprise. OpenAI and Anthropic sell agents wrapped around closed models you cannot inspect or run yourself; Nous is betting that enough buyers want an agent they can audit, self-host and never have to trust a vendor's servers with. Red Hat built a durable business on that argument for Linux. Whether the same logic holds for an agent that writes its own skills - and whether that 2.5 percent token share survives an independent measurement - is what the next year will answer.