Nous Research has raised a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation as it moves its open-source AI work toward business customers. TechCrunch reported the financing on October 7, confirming an earlier report about the startup’s fundraising talks and linking the new capital to the launch of an enterprise offering built around its Hermes agent.

Robot Ventures led the round. TechCrunch said Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung, and 1789 Capital also participated; Donald Trump Jr. is a partner at 1789 Capital. The financing brings total funding for the three-year-old company to $158 million, according to the report.

Replicating open-source agent modules converge on a bright shared network hub.
The company says its open-source Hermes agent has spread widely among developers and individual users.

Nous Research built its following among developers and individual users through Hermes, an open-source agent. The company estimates that Hermes has been cloned more than 24 million times and now accounts for roughly 2.5 percent of global AI token use. Those figures are Nous Research’s own estimates, and TechCrunch’s report does not provide an independent measurement of either claim.

The next target is the enterprise market. A new product called Hermes for Businesses is intended to let companies deploy customized AI agents that can carry out multi-step workflows while keeping company data private and secure. The report does not specify which business systems the agents can connect to, what security architecture supports the privacy promise, or how administrators will monitor and constrain automated actions.

Work tokens move through guarded checkpoints inside a secure enterprise container.
Hermes for Businesses is intended to support customized multi-step workflows while protecting company data.

The fundraising arrives alongside ambitious growth expectations. Citing The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch reported that Nous Research was generating about $36 million in annualized revenue by the middle of September 2026 and expects to exceed $100 million before the end of the year. The latter number is a company projection rather than a completed result.

The strategy puts Nous Research on a path from widely copied open-source software to paid deployments inside organizations. Its developer adoption may help the company attract technical teams already familiar with Hermes, while enterprise buyers will have to evaluate the less visible parts of the product: governance, data handling, reliability, and control over multi-step work. The announced round gives Nous Research substantial backing for that transition, but the report leaves the commercial terms and early customer results undisclosed.