Nous Research Confirms $1.5 Billion Valuation With $90 Million Series B and Enterprise Agent Push

Nous Research, the startup behind the widely cloned open source Hermes Agent, has raised a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, confirming earlier reporting by TechCrunch. The round was led by Robot Ventures, with participation from Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung and 1789 Capital.

The financing brings total funding for the three-year-old startup to $158 million, according to TechCrunch, and sets the stage for the company's most significant strategic shift yet: a push into the enterprise market.

The raise continues a busy stretch for AI startup funding covered in AI industry news.

An Unusual Path to a Billion-Dollar Valuation

Unlike most AI companies that have reached unicorn status in recent years, Nous built its reputation in the open source community rather than the enterprise sales floor. The company's Hermes Agent has been cloned more than 24 million times, and Nous estimates the project drives roughly 2.5 percent of global AI token usage — figures the startup shared with TechCrunch.

That community-first approach has made Hermes a fixture among developers and individual enthusiasts, the audience TechCrunch identifies as the project's core user base. The new valuation suggests investors see commercial potential in converting that grassroots adoption into paid products.

The investor list itself reflects the company's cross-sector appeal. Nvidia's participation ties the startup to the dominant supplier of AI compute hardware, while Samsung's involvement links it to one of the largest consumer electronics manufacturers. 1789 Capital, the venture firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner, adds a political dimension that few AI funding rounds carry.

Hermes for Businesses: The Enterprise Pivot

The capital will fund Nous's move into the enterprise sector with a new offering called Hermes for Businesses, according to TechCrunch. The product allows companies to deploy customized AI agents capable of handling multi-step workflows while keeping their data private and secure.

The pitch leans into a persistent tension in enterprise AI adoption: businesses want the capabilities that agent systems promise, but many remain reluctant to route sensitive workflows through hosted services controlled by large AI vendors. Open source deployments, which companies can run on their own infrastructure, offer an alternative — and Nous is betting that its existing open source credibility will translate into enterprise trust.

The strategy arrives as agent platforms become one of the most competitive corners of the AI industry, with offerings from OpenAI, Meta and a wave of startups all competing to automate knowledge work. Nous's differentiator, at least on paper, is that its agent lineage was built in the open from the start — a distribution advantage that shows up in the clone counts and token usage estimates rather than in marketing spend.

In practice, multi-step agent workflows cover exactly the kind of tasks that have made agentic AI one of the industry's fastest-moving categories: researching a topic across dozens of sources, drafting and revising documents, writing and testing code, or coordinating handoffs between different software tools. A customized deployment lets an organization tune the agent to its own processes and data, rather than adapting its processes to a one-size-fits-all assistant. For regulated industries in particular, the ability to keep that data inside company walls is often the difference between a pilot project and a production deployment.

Revenue Is Growing Fast, From a Small Base

The company reported roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026 and expects to pass $100 million before the end of the year, according to The Wall Street Journal, as cited by TechCrunch. If that projection holds, Nous would join the small group of open source AI companies that have converted community adoption into nine-figure revenue run rates.

Those numbers also contextualize the valuation. At $1.5 billion, the Series B prices the company at roughly 40 times its September annualized revenue — a multiple that depends heavily on the enterprise pivot succeeding quickly. The $100 million year-end target implies the company expects revenue to nearly triple in the final months of 2026.

What It Means for the Open Source AI Market

Nous's round is the latest sign that open weight and open source AI projects are attracting serious institutional capital. Investors who once viewed open source AI as a research community hobby have watched open models close the capability gap with proprietary systems, and valuations across the sector have followed.

For enterprises, the round could accelerate a shift already underway. If Hermes for Businesses gains traction, companies evaluating AI agents will have a mainstream, well-funded open source option alongside the closed platforms from the major labs — potentially changing pricing dynamics across the agent market.

The company has not announced specific milestones for the enterprise product beyond its general availability plans. But with $90 million in new capital, a 24-million-clone distribution channel, and backers spanning chips, consumer electronics and venture capital, Nous Research now has the resources to test whether the open source playbook that reshaped infrastructure software can do the same for AI agents.

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