Nous Research Verifies $1.5B Valuation as It Debuts AI Agents for Business Users

Meta description: Nous Research raises $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation to expand Hermes open-source AI agents into enterprise workflows securely.

Tags: Nous Research, Hermes agent, Series B, AI agents, enterprise AI

Featured image: Abstract technology style, glowing agent workflow nodes, no real people, no company logos, no text.

Nous Research has completed a $90 million Series B that values the startup at $1.5 billion, confirming TechCrunch's earlier reporting. The company is best known for the open-source Hermes agent, a tool that developers and individuals can copy, modify, and run on their own systems. For the AI agent market, the round matters because it shows that investors are putting money behind a specific path: turn open-source popularity into enterprise products that can execute multi-step tasks while keeping company data under tighter control.

Open-Source Adoption Came Before Enterprise Revenue

Before the new round, Nous built its position around developers and individuals using Hermes rather than a single closed enterprise product. The startup estimates that Hermes has been cloned more than 24 million times and is driving roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage. Those numbers are early indicators, not guarantees of commercial success. Cloning counts can reflect curiosity, tutorials, and experiments as well as production use, while token usage shows that some part of the activity is large enough to matter in the broader AI ecosystem.

AI agents are software systems that can plan actions, call tools, and complete tasks across multiple steps. That category has become important because it can move beyond answering questions and into operational work, such as coordinating internal processes or handling requests that require several actions.

Investors Back a Three-Year-Old Agent Startup

The Series B was led by Robot Ventures, with participation from Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung, and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. The mix of backers spans venture firms, a major AI hardware company, and a corporate investor. The new financing brings the three-year-old startup's total funding to $158 million.

For a young company, that amount of capital gives room to build sales, compliance, and enterprise support functions. Those are often the missing pieces when an open-source project moves from a developer favorite to a product that large organizations can evaluate and deploy.

Hermes for Businesses Shapes the Next Phase

The capital will fund Nous Research's push into the enterprise sector with "Hermes for Businesses." The product is designed to let companies deploy customized AI agents that can handle multi-step workflows while keeping their data private and secure. This is the central commercial step: turning a widely cloned open-source agent into a business offering with controls that enterprises expect.

The revenue picture is already moving. The Wall Street Journal reported that Nous was at roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026. The startup expects to pass $100 million before the end of 2026. The projection sets up the next test for the company: whether the adoption signal from Hermes is strong enough to become sustained enterprise demand.

At this stage, Nous Research is transitioning from a developer-driven open-source project to a commercial AI agent vendor. What to watch next is whether "Hermes for Businesses" can convert cloned repositories and token usage into durable paid contracts, and whether the company can keep data privacy, security, and workflow reliability at the center of its enterprise growth.