The open source agent camp just got a war chest. Nous Research, the startup behind the open source Hermes Agent, has raised a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, TechCrunch AI reports. The announcement confirms TechCrunch’s earlier reporting on the deal. Nous is also launching “Hermes for Businesses,” its first real push into enterprise sales.
That’s a big jump for a company that’s three years old. Total funding now stands at $158 million.
📋 The Round
Robot Ventures led the round. The other backers make up an unusual cap table:
- Nvidia. The company that sells the chips now also owns a stake in a major open source agent.
- Union Square Ventures and Menlo Ventures. Two well-known venture firms with long track records in developer tools and enterprise software.
- Samsung. A strategic investor with hardware and device ambitions of its own.
- 1789 Capital. Donald Trump Jr. is a partner at the firm. That gives Nous a political connection at a time when open source AI policy is still being argued over in Washington.
The mix tells you something. This isn’t just a bet on a model. It’s a bet that open source agents will become infrastructure.
📊 The Traction Numbers
This is where the story gets interesting. According to the startup’s own estimates:
- 24 million+ clones of the open source Hermes Agent
- ~2.5% of global AI token usage runs through Hermes Agent
- ~$36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026, per The Wall Street Journal
- $100 million+ in annualized revenue expected before the end of 2026, also per the WSJ
One caveat. The token share figure is self-reported, and nobody outside the company has verified how it’s measured. Still, even if it’s off by half, that’s a lot of real-world agent traffic for a project most enterprise buyers have never heard of.
Now the valuation math. At $1.5 billion against $36 million in run-rate revenue, investors are paying roughly 40x. That only holds up if the $100 million target actually lands. Nous has less than three months to get there.
🎯 The Enterprise Move
Hermes for Businesses lets companies deploy customized AI agents that handle multi-step workflows while keeping their data private and secure.
That last part is the whole pitch. Enterprises have wanted agents for two years. What holds them back is sending sensitive data through a closed vendor’s API. An open source agent they can customize and control fixes a lot of that.
The playbook isn’t new. Red Hat did it with Linux. Databricks did it with Spark. Give the core away, build a huge developer base, then sell the managed, secured, supported version to companies that need someone to call when things break. Nous is running the same play for AI agents.
⚔️ Why This Matters
For most of the agent boom, the enterprise market has belonged to closed labs and their platforms. Open source showed up mostly as model weights. You got the engine, but you had to build the car yourself.
Hermes Agent is different. It’s a full agent framework, and developers have already adopted it widely. That gives Nous a distribution advantage closed vendors can’t buy: millions of developers who already know the tool before procurement ever gets involved.
It’s also a sign of where things are heading. Model quality across labs keeps converging. So the fight is moving to the agent layer, meaning orchestration, tool use, memory and workflow reliability. Whoever owns that layer inside companies owns the relationship.
🧭 Tactical Takeaways
- Practitioners: If you’re building on Hermes Agent, expect enterprise features to show up first in the paid tier. Watch how Nous splits what stays open from what goes commercial.
- Enterprise buyers: You now have a credible open source option for private agent deployments. Run a pilot before you lock into a closed agent platform.
- Competitors: Closed agent vendors should expect price pressure on privacy-sensitive deals.
- Investors: The $100 million revenue target is the number to watch. If Nous hits it, the 40x multiple starts to look reasonable. If it misses, this round will look rich.
🔭 What Comes Next
The next six months will show whether developer love turns into enterprise contracts. Nous has the capital, the user base and some heavyweight backers. Now it has to prove that 24 million clones can turn into paying customers. Full details on the round are available in the original TechCrunch AI report.