Nous Research raises $90M Series B to take its open-source Hermes Agent to businesses

Why it matters

【Key points】

Open-source AI lab Nous Research has raised a $90 million Series B. Investors include NVIDIA, Microsoft's M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Menlo Ventures.

The money goes mainly to Hermes Agent, the AI assistant Nous open-sourced under the MIT license in February. Users choose where it runs and which models it uses; it remembers projects, writes reusable skills as it works and carries them across sessions. Next comes Hermes for Businesses, and Nous has confirmed a mobile app.

【Verifiable】

Primary sources are the fundraising note on Nous's site, signed by CEO Dillon Rolnick, and the @NousResearch announcement on October 7.

Nous says Hermes has been cloned more than 24 million times and, by its own internal estimate, drives about 2.5% of global token usage. The second figure is self-reported and cannot be checked externally. The Wall Street Journal reported that, per OpenRouter, Hermes has overtaken OpenClaw and other open-source assistants by usage.

Valuation figures circulating online do not appear in Nous's own materials.

【Our read】

The story is not the size of the round but where the bet sits. Nous began by fine-tuning Llama; now it is putting its money on the agent layer rather than training frontier models. Its logic: models are swappable, but the memory, skills and workflows users build up are what matter, and that layer should be open and owned by the user.

That runs opposite to OpenAI's dots or Anthropic's Claude apps, which tie the agent to the vendor's own model. NVIDIA and Microsoft both appearing on the cap table suggests big players are hedging on a model-agnostic agent layer.

The risk is just as clear: Hermes is only as capable as the models it plugs into, and if upstream vendors change prices or tighten subscription access, it has to adapt. Whether the business edition can satisfy companies on security and permissions is the question this $90 million has to answer.