Nous Research, the company behind the open-source AI agent Hermes, announced on Wednesday (October 7) a $90 million Series B investment round that values the startup at $1.5 billion. The announcement was confirmed by the company itself in an official note published on its website, which also revealed the launch of "Hermes for Businesses," a version dedicated to the corporate market.
The announcement marks a pivotal moment in the race for autonomous AI agents. Since its February 2026 launch, Hermes Agent has been cloned more than 24 million times and, according to the company's own estimates, accounts for approximately 2.5% of all AI tokens processed worldwide. These figures position Hermes as one of the most widespread AI agent projects in the ecosystem — and its entry into the enterprise market promises to further expand that reach.
Who is investing and where the money is coming from
The round was led by Robot Ventures, with participation from investors including Nvidia, M12 (Microsoft's venture capital arm), Samsung, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, and Menlo Ventures. Notably, Nous Research itself did not name an official round lead, and in its public statement, CEO Dillon Rolnick merely listed participants without any hierarchy. Rolnick himself observed, with a hint of satisfaction, that "$90 million is modest in today's fundraising landscape," adding that "Nous has always delivered more with less."
The total capital raised by the startup, which was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra, now exceeds $158 million. Prior to this round, the company had raised approximately $70 million in earlier rounds, including investors such as Paradigm, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan.
Hermes for Businesses: what is known
The product that interests the corporate market most is "Hermes for Businesses." According to the company, the solution will allow organizations to select AI models by price and purpose, keep AI usage private, and maintain full ownership of institutional knowledge. Nous's stated principle is straightforward: "The people using an AI system should control it."
Unlike proprietary AI assistant platforms — where companies are at the mercy of a single provider and its pricing — Hermes for Businesses promises a multi-model approach, enabling enterprises to switch between different providers based on their cost and performance needs. This fits into a broader trend where companies relying exclusively on closed AI solutions (such as ChatGPT API or Claude API) are transferring unpredictable costs to their engineering budgets.
The context: open-source agents as infrastructure
The choice to direct capital toward open-source agents is not merely an ideological matter. In a landscape where major players like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic operate with closed models and consumption-based pricing, the proposition of offering an autonomous agent with open-source code and multi-model support represents a direct alternative for technological sovereignty.
The logic parallels what drove Linux adoption in data centers during the 2000s: when the underlying infrastructure becomes critical to essential operations, the ability to audit and control the system starts to matter more than the convenience of proprietary solutions. Hermes runs locally, on virtual servers, or via cloud deployment, and allows companies to keep their data offline or on their own infrastructure.
It is worth noting that Nous is not the only player in this space. Other autonomous agent companies — including solutions like OpenClaw, which directly competes with Hermes — have also attracted significant investments. What differentiates Hermes from its competitors is that its open-source model already has an active community of over 214,000 GitHub stars and nearly 40,000 forks, making it one of the most popular projects in its category.
What to watch in the coming months
Two aspects deserve special attention. First, the claim that Hermes drives 2.5% of all global AI processing is an ambitious assertion that remains unverified by independent third parties. If confirmed, it would place Nous at a usage level comparable to platforms that dominate specific niches — but the figure was disclosed by the company itself and not by an external analyst. Second, the absence of a declared lead investor in the round raises the question of whether Nous is strategically avoiding having any single partner hold significant veto power over its future decisions.
Nous's entry into the corporate market will be tested in the coming quarters. Companies that currently use third-party AI agents may decide to migrate to Hermes for Businesses if the promise of control and privacy proves compelling. The question is whether open-source agents will be able to win the trust of large corporations before closed models cement their absolute dominance in the enterprise market — or whether Hermes will prove that, in the era of autonomous agents, transparency and code control are, in themselves, a decisive competitive advantage.
Sources: TechCrunch, The Next Web, Nous Research
✓ Independent sources cross-checked and verified before publishing
