Nous Research Raises 90 Million Dollars As Hermes Agent Clones Pass 24 Million
The fundraise pairs an open-source agent distribution number with an enterprise product, Hermes for Businesses, meaning Nous Research is now selling the same codebase into companies that need confidential-data handling and usage management.
Reporting from 1 source: GIGAZINE.
Nous Research announced on October 7, 2026 that it raised 90 million dollars in a Series B round led by Robot Ventures, with NVIDIA, Microsoft's M12, Samsung, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Menlo Ventures among the investors. The company's valuation is 1.5 billion dollars. Cumulative funding has reached 158 million dollars. Nous Research released the open-source Hermes Agent in February 2026, and says clone numbers since release have passed 24 million.
Hermes Agent shipped in February 2026 under the MIT license and lets users pick their own AI model and execution environment, including local models, with saved work and skills carrying over when the model changes. Nous Research puts the clone count since release above 24 million and estimates the agent accounts for about 2.5% of token usage across AI models worldwide.
The new money goes toward Hermes for Businesses, a service for companies that need model selection by business objective and cost, protection of confidential information, and management of knowledge accumulated inside the company.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.