Nous Research raises $90M to sell the hosted layer of Hermes Agent

Eight months after it put Hermes Agent on GitHub under an MIT license, Nous Research has raised $90 million to sell the parts of it that are not free. The Series B was announced on October 7 and led by Robot Ventures. Crypto Briefing and Dealroom list Nvidia, Microsoft's M12, Samsung, Y Combinator, Union Square Ventures and Menlo Ventures among the other backers. The Wall Street Journal reported a $1.5 billion valuation. Nous has not published that number itself, though SiliconANGLE stated it outright in its coverage.

On its face this is another AI agent startup collecting a large check in a year full of them. Look at where the money is meant to go, though, and it becomes a test of a specific bet: that an agent anyone can download for free can still support a company valued like a mature software business, as long as the company owns the hosted layer.

What was raised, and what is still fuzzy

The numbers moved over the summer. TechCrunch reported on July 13, citing unnamed sources, that Nous was finalizing a round of at least $75 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, with Robot Ventures leading and USV participating. The October announcement came in at $90 million. Trending Topics, which had covered the earlier figure, described the final round as larger than expected at the same valuation. That fits the reporting, but the valuation still rests on the Journal's sourcing rather than a company filing or statement.

Totals differ a little too. Dealroom puts Nous's lifetime funding at about $158 million, and Crypto Briefing and Trending Topics round it to roughly $160 million. Both counts include a $50 million Series A led by Paradigm in April 2025. According to The Block, that earlier round valued a token the company had not yet launched at $1 billion. The token history matters because Nous came out of open-source and crypto circles, and its investor list still shows it.

The traction claims, and who is making them

The most useful figure in the coverage is revenue. The Wall Street Journal reported that Nous reached about $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September and expects to pass $100 million by the end of the year. Trending Topics notes that the year-end target is management's own forecast. It would mean nearly tripling the run rate in about three and a half months, so it is an ambition, not a result yet.

Usage numbers depend on who is counting. The Journal reported 22.7 million downloads since February. Nous says Hermes has been downloaded or cloned more than 24 million times, and SiliconANGLE adds that the project has several thousand open-source contributors. Nous also claims Hermes drives about 2.5 percent of global token consumption. That is an internal estimate, and no outside party has verified it. In July The Block counted roughly 214,000 GitHub stars and nearly 40,000 forks, which puts Hermes among the most visible agent projects of the year whichever download figure you use.

The product itself is a general-purpose agent. SiliconANGLE describes a desktop app that works with local files and programs, browses the web, and runs code inside a Docker container. It routes each prompt to the model best suited to it on cost, speed and quality, whether that is a frontier model such as Claude or one of Nous's own fine-tuned Hermes 4 models. It keeps memory across sessions and writes reusable skills as it works. It can be driven from Telegram, Discord, Slack or WhatsApp, and it can run around the clock.

Open core, applied to agents

The plan is not new. The open-source infrastructure companies of the last decade ran it first: give the engine away, then charge for running it safely at scale. What is new is applying it to an agent that touches a company's files, credentials and chat channels.

Nous's portal already shows the tiers. Hermes Business runs on Nous infrastructure with an isolated tenant for each team, one shared balance, per-member spend caps, admin roles and a shared skills library. Hermes Enterprise runs on infrastructure the customer controls and adds SSO, service-level agreements and hands-on onboarding, with pricing available only through sales. Crypto Briefing reported that the "Hermes for Businesses" push will also bring detailed auditing and workspace controls. The public business page lists SSO only for the Enterprise tier and says nothing about audit logs so far, so treat those features as announced but not yet shipped. Individuals were already paying $20 to $200 a month for hosted Hermes, according to The Block.

The logic is simple. A solo developer can run an MIT-licensed agent on a laptop for nothing. A security team cannot approve that agent for 2,000 employees without identity management, spend controls, an audit trail and someone to call when it breaks. Nous is betting that its paid product is that gap, not the agent.

The pressure on the model

Two forces work against it. First, the license that drove adoption also lets anyone else host Hermes. Cloud providers, consultancies and rival startups can wrap the same code in their own SSO and billing. Nous's edge has to come from speed, its own models and the shared-skills network effect, not from owning the code.

Second, the competition has more money. Trending Topics points to OpenClaw, the open-source agent whose creator Peter Steinberger has joined OpenAI, and to well-funded closed products from Cognition and Replit. Enterprise buyers tend to choose the vendor with the longest track record on compliance, and a three-year-old lab with crypto roots has to earn that trust in quarters, not years.

What to watch

The year-end revenue number will tell you most of what you need. If Nous gets anywhere near $100 million, it will show that a free agent can create paid demand for hosting, and every open agent project will copy the structure. If it lands closer to the current run rate, the 24 million downloads become a familiar open-source story: huge reach, with the money going to whoever runs the software best. Watch for a published SSO and audit spec, named enterprise customers, and whether the 2.5 percent token-share claim ever gets an outside audit. Those will show whether Nous is selling a product or a narrative.