Nous Research raises $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation to scale Hermes Agent
The open-source AI lab plans to take its self-improving agent into the enterprise and onto your phone
Nous Research has raised $90 million in a Series B round that values the open-source AI lab at $1.5 billion. The company announced the deal on October 7, 2026.
The money is earmarked for Hermes Agent, the lab’s autonomous AI assistant, along with a business-focused version and a planned mobile app.
Who wrote the checks
Robot Ventures led the round. The supporting cast includes NVIDIA, Microsoft’s M12, Samsung, Y Combinator, Union Square Ventures and Menlo Ventures, among others.
The new raise brings Nous Research’s total capital to approximately $160 million. CEO Dillon Rolnick authored the note announcing the fundraise.
The Series B follows a $50 million Series A led by Paradigm in April 2025. That round was part of an earlier package of equity and Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT) funding totaling around $70 million.
A SAFT is a contract investors use to buy the right to tokens that a project expects to issue later, rather than buying shares today. Its presence in Nous Research’s earlier funding stack gives the company’s capital history a digital-asset dimension that most AI labs simply do not have.
What Hermes Agent actually does
Hermes Agent launched in February 2026 under an MIT license, one of the most permissive open-source licenses available. Developers can use, modify and redistribute the code with very few strings attached.
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The agent is built to be autonomous and self-improving. It keeps persistent memory across sessions and generates its own reusable skills as it works.
Users can run it locally on their own hardware or through hosted options.
Hermes Agent has been downloaded or cloned more than 24 million times since launch.
The agent also accounts for about 2.5% of global AI token inference usage. In AI terms, tokens are the small chunks of text that models read and produce, so this figure is a rough gauge of how much real work Hermes is doing across the world’s AI compute.
The enterprise pivot, sort of
The headline use of the new capital is an offering the company calls “Hermes for Businesses.” The plan is to bolt on the features corporate IT departments insist on before anything touches a company laptop.
Those include Single Sign-On (SSO), which lets employees log in with their existing work credentials. Nous Research also plans to add detailed auditing capabilities and workspace controls.
The company says Hermes will stay open source through all of this. Users are meant to keep control over which models they choose and how they deploy them.
Background: a lab built on open weights and open code
Nous Research was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium and Shivani Mitra. From the start, it positioned itself as an open-source AI lab.
In roughly three years, the company has gone from founding to a $1.5 billion valuation. Its funding has also climbed steadily, from the roughly $70 million equity and SAFT package that included the Paradigm-led Series A to the $90 million Series B announced this week.