Nous Research Raises $90 Million for Open-Source A.I. Agent Hermes

Nous Research has closed a $90 million Series B, putting the open-source agent maker at a $1.5 billion valuation. Robot Ventures led the round, with Nvidia, Microsoft’s venture arm M12 and Samsung also in the mix, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The company was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium and Shivani Mitra. Before this round, it had already taken in about $70 million from backers including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital and Balaji Srinivasan. Paradigm led a $50 million Series A in spring 2025, and the new funding lifts Nous’s total haul to roughly $160 million.

Hermes is the project at the center of all this. It can browse the web, edit files, write code and pick up new skills from how people use it. It also works through Telegram and Discord, and can keep running all day. The numbers are hard to ignore: The Journal says Hermes has been downloaded more than 22.7 million times since February, while by summer the project had about 214,000 GitHub stars and nearly 40,000 forks. The hosted version costs between $20 and $200 a month.

The business plan is the familiar open-core play: keep the software free, then charge companies for hosting, security, management and support. Nous says annualized revenue reached $36 million in mid-September and expects to pass $100 million by year-end, though that is its own forecast. The bigger test is whether that enthusiasm sticks once businesses have to open their wallets.

Hermes arrived just weeks after the OpenClaw wave and is seen as its direct rival. OpenClaw was created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, who has since joined OpenAI, and will continue as open source under a foundation. But the field is much wider than that one rivalry, with Cognition, Replit and Mistral AI all pushing hard on agents and business tools.