Nous Research raises $90M for Hermes for Businesses
Nous Research raised $90M and plans Hermes for Businesses, an enterprise version of its MIT-licensed Hermes Agent. What it means for owning your AI agent.
Nous Research, the team behind the open-source Hermes Agent, raised $90 million and says the money will build Hermes for Businesses, a company version of the agent. TechCrunch reports the round is a Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Robot Ventures. The hook for operators: the most-cloned open agent now has a vendor that wants to sell you support for it.
What actually happened
Per Nous Research's own note, investors include NVIDIA, Microsoft's M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Menlo Ventures. TechCrunch puts total funding at $158 million.
Hermes Agent shipped in February under the MIT license. Nous says it has been cloned more than 24 million times and drives about 2.5% of global AI token usage. Both numbers are the company's own estimates. TechCrunch, citing The Wall Street Journal, reports annualized revenue of about $36 million by mid-September.
Hermes for Businesses is a plan, not a product page. Nous says it will let companies pick models by cost and goal, run AI privately at scale, and keep their own institutional knowledge. We found no pricing, no deployment details and no ship date. Treat it as a direction until those exist.
Why Hermes for Businesses matters for your business
The license is the asset. An MIT-licensed agent can run on your hardware, against the model you pick, with your data staying where you put it. If Nous raises prices or changes course, you keep the code you already run. That is the opposite of a closed agent platform, where the vendor holds the runtime and the logs.
Open source is not the same as safe. We wrote about Hermes's YOLO mode before. An agent you self-host still needs approval gates, scoped credentials and an audit log. A business tier may add those. Until it ships, you build them.
Model choice is a cost lever. "Pick the model by cost and goal" is the right instinct. Most agent steps are routing, extraction and lookups. Send those to a cheap model. Save the expensive one for the step that writes to your customer or your books.
Ask the boring questions. Who patches it? Who answers at 2 a.m.? What happens to your agent if the vendor pivots? Funding answers none of those. A contract does.
Key takeaways
- Nous Research raised $90M; TechCrunch reports a $1.5B valuation led by Robot Ventures
- Hermes Agent is MIT-licensed; 24M clones and 2.5% of token usage are company estimates
- Hermes for Businesses has no published pricing, deployment details or date yet
- An open license lets you keep the runtime, the model choice and the data
- Self-hosted agents still need approval gates, scoped keys and logs
Want an agent you actually own? We build agents on open runtimes like Hermes, wire them to the models that fit your budget, and add the approval gates and logs a vendor would charge you for. See how we build vendor-agnostic AI systems or tell us which workflow to start with.
Sources: Nous Research, TechCrunch.
- #hermes-agent
- #open-source-ai
- #ai-agents
- #nous-research
- #funding
Tommy Rush — Founder, Rush Commerce
Operator turned builder. 15+ years running operations — now shipping the systems businesses run on. More
Get The Rush Report weekly — one email, zero fluff.
Keep reading
Stuut raises $52.5M: AI collections agents chase invoices
Stuut's $52.5M Series B funds AI collections agents across order-to-cash. What it means for small businesses with slow receivables and a full AR inbox.
Read itMelius raises $25M for AI ad creative agents: own your brand rules
Melius, an AI ad creative agent platform from ex-Ramp engineers, raised $25M led by CRV. Why cheap AI creative makes your brand rules the real asset.
Read it