Nvidia, Samsung back $90M round for AI agent startup Nous Research
SiliconANGLE Maria Deutscher ● Covered by 2 sources
Nvidia and Samsung just backed a $90M round for Nous Research. Its open-source Hermes agent says it’s been downloaded 24M times and is already pulling serious power.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Maria Deutscher — read the original for the full story.
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Nous Research has raised $90 million in a Series B round led by Robot Ventures, with Nvidia, Samsung, Y Combinator and others joining in. The company says the round puts its valuation at $1.5 billion. That’s a big number for a startup best known for Hermes, an AI agent it released in February under an open-source license.
Hermes has moved fast. Nous says it has been downloaded more than 24 million times and has drawn several thousand open-source contributors. The company also says the agent accounts for about 2.5% of global token consumption, a rough measure tied to the hardware demand of AI models. For an app that started as a download, that’s real traction, not conference-booth puffery.
The product itself is built to do work on a user’s machine. Hermes comes as a desktop app that can sort files, use browser access to pull web data, run code in a Docker container and interact with installed programs. Under the hood, it can use models like Claude, but it also works with Nous’s own lineup of customized open-source models.
Those in-house models are grouped under the Hermes 4 series. Nous says it trained them with 5 million synthetically generated records, about two thirds of which were aimed at improving reasoning. The company used its own DataForge tool to generate that data. Hermes also includes a router that sends each prompt to the model best suited for the job, weighing cost, speed and quality, plus a personalization module that can be extended with outside databases such as RetainDB to keep preferences and project data across sessions.
The money is going toward business adoption. Nous sells Hermes Cloud for consumers who want to launch agents quickly, and Hermes Business and Hermes Enterprise for organizations that want team token limits and shared customizations. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company had reached $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September and expected to cross $100 million by year-end.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the part of AI that actually matters: open systems that people can use, extend, and inspect instead of renting mystery software from a glossy demo. Nvidia and Samsung backing it only makes the obvious trend louder — the money still flows to the tools that get embedded into real work, not the ones that merely talk a good game. Europe should be paying attention here, because the closed-model showmanship is getting old fast.
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