Quick answer
Nous Research raised $90 million in a Series B reported on October 7, 2026, at a $1.5 billion valuation per the Wall Street Journal (the company did not disclose it), led by Robot Ventures with Nvidia, Microsoft's M12, Samsung, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, and Menlo Ventures. The money goes to Hermes for Businesses, an enterprise version of its MIT-licensed Hermes Agent with SSO, audit logging, workspace controls, SLAs, model choice, and self-hosting. Nous says the agent has been cloned more than 24 million times (the WSJ cites 22.7 million downloads), reports about $36 million in annualised revenue as of mid-September, and expects to pass $100 million by year end. Total funding is about $158 million.
Most agent companies sell a product. Nous gave one away under the most permissive licence available and is now raising on the back of how far it spread. That makes this round a data point about open-source agents, not just about one company.
What Hermes Agent is
- An MIT-licensed autonomous agent released in February 2026, self-hosted or cloud, on macOS, Windows, and Linux
- Persistent memory across sessions and automatic creation of reusable skills as it works
- 70+ built-in tools: web search, browser automation, vision, image generation, text-to-speech
- 20+ messaging gateways including Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, Signal, and email
- Any model provider, from local models to OpenRouter's catalogue; a v0.20 release in August added streaming voice and an agent-to-agent protocol
What the enterprise version adds
Hermes for Businesses wraps the open agent in what procurement asks for: single sign-on, audit logs, workspace controls, service-level agreements, and deployment on a company's own cloud or on-premises, with the ability to choose models by price and goal. Coverage says the code stays open. The commercial bet is that companies will pay for governance around a tool their engineers already run.
The numbers to treat with care
The 24 million clones figure is Nous's own and counts git clones, not users; the 2.5% share of global token usage is an internal estimate. Revenue and the valuation come from the WSJ's reporting. Star counts across directories vary widely. What is not in doubt is that the agent is widely used and that serious investors priced the company accordingly.
Related reading
Bottom line
Open-source agents now have a funded, enterprise-grade option that is not owned by a model lab. If you want an agent you control and your company wants a contract, Hermes for Businesses is the first product built for both.
