Nous Research has confirmed a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, as the open-source AI-agent startup moves to sell customized agents to businesses.
Robot Ventures led the round, with Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung and 1789 Capital among the participants. The financing brings the three-year-old company’s total funding to $158 million.
What changed
The company is launching Hermes for Businesses, a product aimed at companies that want AI agents to execute multi-step workflows while maintaining control over private data. That is a meaningful expansion beyond the developer and individual users that have driven adoption of its open-source Hermes Agent.
Nous says Hermes has been cloned more than 24 million times and accounts for about 2.5% of global AI token use, based on the startup’s estimates. Those figures signal broad experimentation, though enterprise purchasing will depend less on downloads than on reliability, deployment controls and measurable workflow outcomes.
TechCrunch reported that Nous was at roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company expects to exceed $100 million by the end of 2026.
Why operators should pay attention
The enterprise AI-agent market is shifting from generic chat interfaces toward systems designed to complete sequences of work: retrieving information, invoking tools and handing results to people or downstream software. That promise is appealing in operations, support, internal knowledge work and developer workflows—but it also raises practical requirements around permissions, data handling, auditability and error recovery.
Nous is positioning its open-source roots as an advantage for organizations that want more control than a closed, fully hosted assistant may offer. “Private and secure” deployment is particularly important for buyers in regulated industries or companies that are reluctant to route sensitive operational data through third-party systems without clear governance.
For founders and technical leaders, the announcement is another sign that open-source agent projects are seeking a commercial path through enterprise packaging: customized deployment, workflow configuration, security features and support. The business opportunity is not simply providing a model or an agent framework; it is reducing the operational work required to put agents into production safely.
What to watch next
The key question is whether Hermes for Businesses can convert developer enthusiasm into repeatable enterprise deployments. Buyers will want evidence on how agents perform across long-running tasks, where human approval is required, how access to internal systems is restricted and how failures can be traced.
Nous’s growth target also sets a high bar. Moving from an annualized revenue figure reported at about $36 million to more than $100 million in the same year would require rapid enterprise adoption or significant expansion among existing users.
The funding gives the company resources to pursue that transition. Its next test will be demonstrating that an open-source agent can meet the security, governance and reliability standards that turn experimentation into a durable business workflow.
