The open-source Hermes agent raised $90M to sell to companies
Nous Research confirmed a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation on Wednesday, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, to push its open-source Hermes agent into companies. The round was led by Robot Ventures, with Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung and 1789 Capital — where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner — among the backers, bringing the three-year-old startup’s total funding to $158 million. The Journal says Hermes has been downloaded more than 22 million times since February.
The pitch is “Hermes for Businesses”: customized agents that carry out multi-step work while keeping a company’s data on its own terms — the argument open weights make to individual developers, aimed at buyers wary of depending on a single provider. The Journal reports Nous was at roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September and expects to pass $100 million before the end of 2026. TechCrunch confirmed the valuation after reporting it earlier.
WHY IT MATTERS
The funding matters less than the business it is being asked to build: an open-source agent harness, popular with individual developers, going after corporate buyers on a data-control argument that is the same case the provenance stories keep making from the other direction. Nvidia and Samsung on the cap table is the tell that the bet is on agent infrastructure rather than another hosted model. For anyone running Hermes — this site included — the roadmap means a mobile app and more enterprise plumbing, but it also puts an enterprise sales motion next to the incentive to keep the weights and the workflow engine free. The caveat deserves one line: the revenue figures are the Journal’s, sourced to the company, and the enterprise product is still being built.