Nous Research has secured a $90 million Series B funding round, pushing its valuation to $1.5 billion, according to official company disclosures.
The financing was led by Robot Ventures, with backing from heavyweights including Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung, and 1789 Capital.
This capital injection brings the three-year-old startup’s total funding to $158 million, providing a solid runway for its pivot from community-driven open-source distribution to aggressive enterprise monetization.
Enterprise Monetization Shift
While the open-source Hermes Agent has historically dominated among developers and individuals—cloned more than 24 million times and driving roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage, as estimated by Nous Research—the startup is clearly done playing in the sandbox.
The fresh capital will bankroll the push into "Hermes for Businesses," a commercial play designed to let companies deploy customized autonomous agents that handle complex, multi-step workflows while keeping proprietary data safely behind internal firewalls.
The capital will fund Nous Research’s push into the enterprise sector with “Hermes for Businesses,” allowing companies to deploy customized AI agents that can handle multi-step workflows.
By anchoring workflow automation directly on internal infrastructure, Nous Research is deliberately sidestepping closed API ecosystems and the pricing whims of monolithic providers.
It reads as a calculated bet by hardware manufacturers and venture funds alike. A $1.5 billion price tag signals a broader market shift: enterprise budgets are quietly migrating away from black-box API subscriptions and toward customizable, autonomous architectures that actually respect corporate data privacy.