Nous Research, the artificial intelligence startup behind the widely popular open-source Hermes agent, has successfully closed a $90 million Series B financing round. The investment values the three-year-old company at $1.5 billion, officially confirming earlier market reports regarding the firm’s soaring valuation and fundraising trajectory.
The funding round was led by Robot Ventures, drawing strong participation from a high-profile roster of returning and new institutional and strategic backers. Among the key investors joining the round are industry heavyweight Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung, and 1789 Capital, a venture firm where Donald Trump Jr. serves as a partner. With this fresh capital injection, Nous Research has now raised a total of $158 million since its inception, marking a meteoric rise for a company operating in the fiercely competitive foundational AI and agentic software landscape.
The substantial backing highlights the growing investor appetite for open-source AI infrastructure and specialized agentic workflows, moving beyond general-purpose large language models toward systems capable of executing complex, multi-step actions autonomously.
Powering Global Developer Communities and Massive Token Volume
At the core of Nous Research’s rapid ascent is its flagship creation: the Hermes agent. Built as an open-source model and agent framework, Hermes has captured the imagination of developers, researchers, and tech enthusiasts around the globe. According to internal estimates provided by the startup, the Hermes agent has been cloned more than 24 million times across various repositories and platforms.
This massive grassroots adoption has translated into extraordinary network effects. Nous Research estimates that workflows powered by or utilizing Hermes drive roughly 2.5% of all global artificial intelligence token usage. This staggering metric places the startup’s technology at the center of a significant slice of the world’s daily AI computational consumption, proving that open-source models can compete effectively against proprietary giants backed by trillion-dollar balance sheets.
The startup’s developer-first philosophy has allowed it to build a loyal community that continually fine-tunes, tests, and deploys its models. By keeping its technology accessible, Nous Research has fostered a collaborative ecosystem that accelerates innovation cycles far quicker than traditional closed-source development models typically allow.
Scaling Up With "Hermes for Businesses"
Armed with $90 million in fresh capital, Nous Research is now setting its sights firmly on the enterprise market. The startup plans to channel the majority of the new funds into scaling its upcoming commercial enterprise offering, provisionally dubbed “Hermes for Businesses.”
The enterprise initiative is designed to bridge the gap between powerful open-source flexibility and the stringent security, privacy, and compliance requirements demanded by large corporations. "Hermes for Businesses" will allow enterprises to deploy customized, highly specialized AI agents capable of orchestrating multi-step workflows across internal software stacks and databases. Crucially, the platform is engineered to ensure that corporate data remains strictly private and secure, addressing the primary concern that has historically made many risk-averse organizations hesitant to adopt third-party artificial intelligence tools.
By tailoring its open-source foundations into manageable, secure enterprise packages, Nous Research aims to capture a lucrative share of the corporate automation market, where businesses are desperately seeking intelligent systems that can automate routine tasks without exposing proprietary intellectual property or violating regulatory frameworks.
Explosive Revenue Growth Amid Rapid Commercialization
The Series B financing and enterprise pivot arrive on the heels of phenomenal financial growth for the young startup. According to recent reports citing financial data disclosed to The Wall Street Journal, Nous Research reached an annualized revenue run rate of approximately $36 million by mid-September 2026.
Furthermore, the company’s leadership projects that momentum will accelerate drastically over the final quarter of the year, with expectations to surpass the $100 million annualized revenue milestone before the end of 2026. This lightning-fast transition from an open-source research community project to a nine-figure revenue-generating enterprise underscores the immense commercial viability of agentic AI workflows.
As artificial intelligence shifts from a novelty chat interface into an indispensable operational layer for modern businesses, startups like Nous Research are proving that open-source models can command enterprise-grade trust, adoption, and financial success.
