Pomegra
Nous Research raised $90M in a Series B led by Robot Ventures at a $1.5B valuation and launched Hermes for Businesses, its first enterprise AI agent product.
Key Takeaways
- Nous Research closed a $90M Series B at a confirmed $1.5B valuation on October 7, 2026.
- Robot Ventures led; Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung and 1789 Capital joined.
- Annualized revenue reached about $36M in mid-September, with a target above $100M by year-end.
Lead
Nous Research, the open-source AI lab behind the Hermes Agent, announced a $90 million Series B on October 7, 2026, at a $1.5 billion valuation. Robot Ventures led the round. Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung and 1789 Capital also participated. The raise brings total funding for the three-year-old company to about $158 million.
The announcement also introduced Hermes for Businesses, an enterprise version of the agent. The valuation had been reported by TechCrunch in July 2026, so the October announcement confirms a figure the market already had.
What Is Hermes for Businesses?
Hermes for Businesses is a paid version of the open-source Hermes Agent that lets companies deploy customized agents for multi-step workflows while keeping data inside their own systems. Customers can choose underlying models by price and objective instead of committing to a single provider.
The agent remembers projects, builds reusable skills and runs on macOS, Windows and Linux. It also connects through messaging apps including Telegram, Slack and WhatsApp. It competes most directly with closed agent products from the large model vendors, which tie customers to one model family and host their data.
How Big Is Hermes Agent?
Hermes Agent has been cloned more than 24 million times and drives roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage, according to the company. Dealroom puts downloads at 22.7 million. The project carries an MIT license, released in February 2026, and has passed 214,000 GitHub stars in about six months.
Those are adoption figures for a free product. The commercial question is how many of those users become paying enterprise accounts, and the company has not disclosed customer counts.
Does the Revenue Support a $1.5B Price?
Nous reported annualized revenue of about $36 million in mid-September 2026 and expects to pass $100 million before the end of the year. At $36 million, the valuation works out to roughly 42 times annualized revenue. At the $100 million target, the multiple falls to 15.
The projection requires revenue to nearly triple in under four months. The company has not said how much of the current figure comes from enterprise contracts versus other sources, so the path to $100 million is hard to verify from outside.
What Did Earlier Funding Look Like?
Nous raised a $50 million Series A in April 2025, led by Paradigm. The Series B adds $90 million, so the two rounds account for $140 million of the $158 million total. The company started in 2023 by fine-tuning Meta's Llama models and building synthetic data techniques. It also developed YaRN, a method for extending the context windows of language models at lower cost.
The new investor list is notable for its strategic names. Nvidia and Samsung supply hardware that agent workloads consume, which gives both a commercial interest in a widely used open-source agent.
Why Does the Open-Source Model Matter for Enterprise Sales?
Open-source distribution lowers customer acquisition cost but complicates monetization, because the free version is already capable. Nous is betting that companies will pay for deployment support, data controls and managed infrastructure around a core they can inspect.
Red Hat built a large business on that model in Linux. Several open-source AI companies have since found the conversion from free users to paying customers slower than adoption metrics implied. Nous's 2.5% share of token usage suggests real developer pull, but token volume does not itself generate revenue.
What Comes Next for Nous Research?
The next test is whether enterprise contracts arrive at the pace the revenue forecast requires. A year-end figure near $100 million would validate the pivot from research lab to software vendor. A figure closer to the current run rate would leave the valuation resting mostly on developer adoption.
Competition is also tightening. The large model providers are bundling their own agents into existing enterprise contracts, and model-agnostic pricing is a selling point that rivals can copy.
Outlook
Nous Research has moved from fine-tuning experiments to a $1.5 billion company with a commercial product, on the strength of an open-source agent with tens of millions of clones. The coming quarter will show whether the $36 million revenue base can grow toward $100 million and whether enterprise buyers pay for a product they could partly run for free.
