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Nous Research raises $90M Series B at $1.5B, launches Hermes for Businesses

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

Open-source agent maker Nous Research closed a $90M Series B at a $1.5B valuation and launched Hermes for Businesses, an enterprise product built on 24 million Hermes clones.

Nous Research raises $90M Series B at $1.5B, launches Hermes for Businesses

Companies can now deploy private, governed, multi-step agents built on Hermes, the open-source agent Nous Research says has already been cloned more than 24 million times, rather than adopting an unproven enterprise agent platform from scratch. Nous funded that launch, Hermes for Businesses, with a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Robot Ventures with Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Samsung participating, according to the Wall Street Journal's reporting, cited by Renascence.

What

Hermes drives roughly 2.5% of global AI token consumption, per the company's own estimate reported by DigitalToday, citing TechCrunch. The new funding brings Nous Research's total raised to about $158 million. The Wall Street Journal reported the company's annualized revenue reached roughly $36 million by mid-September 2026, with Nous projecting it will pass $100 million before year-end, according to the same DigitalToday report. Hermes for Businesses lets companies deploy customized, multi-step agents for internal workflows while keeping their data private, rather than relying on the public version of the agent.

Existing Hermes users get the clearest reason to evaluate now

Nous built Hermes's reach by giving the agent away for anyone to clone and run locally; Hermes for Businesses is the paid layer on top of that same base, not a separate product a team has to learn cold. A team already running Hermes clones in production has the most direct upgrade path, since it extends a tool already proven inside its own workflows rather than swapping agents. The $36 million-to-$100 million revenue trajectory Nous is projecting backs up that the enterprise motion already has paying customers behind it, not just a launch announcement. A team evaluating agent platforms from scratch has less reason to move yet: Hermes for Businesses still competes against the subscription-seat model Anthropic and Microsoft already sell at scale through Claude and Copilot, and Nous has not published the terms that would make that comparison apples to apples.

What to watch next

Hold off comparing Hermes for Businesses against named competitors until Nous publishes pricing and governance or compliance details for the enterprise product. Those numbers, not the clone count, will decide whether it undercuts the Copilot and ChatGPT Enterprise seat model or just matches it at a different price.

Sources