The Pulse
Nous Research raises $90 million at a $1.5 billion valuation
Nous Research, the maker of the open-source Hermes Agent, said it raised $90 million in a Series B to build a business version of Hermes. The Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch put the valuation at $1.5 billion, with Robot Ventures leading.
AI.info Team · Written with AI ·
Nous Research, the company behind the open-source Hermes Agent, has raised $90 million, chief executive Dillon Rolnick wrote in a note on the company’s website on October 7. The note lists Nvidia, Microsoft’s M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Menlo Ventures as investors “among others,” and the company said in a post on X the same day that the financing was a Series B.
The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the completed round, and TechCrunch put the valuation at $1.5 billion; Rolnick’s note does not give one. Robot Ventures led the round, according to the Journal and TechCrunch. TechCrunch’s list of other backers also included 1789 Capital, the venture firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner.
Rolnick wrote that Nous released Hermes Agent under the MIT license in February. The company says Hermes has been cloned more than 24 million times and, by its internal estimates, drives about 2.5% of global token usage.
Somehow, $90 million is modest in modern fundraising. We at Nous have always delivered more with less, and we are proud of our resourcefulness in an age of waste.
Dillon Rolnick, CEO, Nous Research
A July report described a round in progress
In a July 13, 2026, report, TechCrunch said Nous was finalizing a round led by Robot Ventures at a $1.5 billion valuation. Citing three people familiar with the deal, the publication reported that the company was seeking at least $75 million and had attracted significant participation from USV and other investors. Nous declined to comment at the time, TechCrunch reported; USV and Robot Ventures did not respond to its requests for comment.
The completed round came in above the minimum TechCrunch said in July that Nous was seeking, at the same valuation. TechCrunch also reported, citing Crunchbase, that Nous had raised $70 million before this round, from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, Delphi Ventures, OSS Capital and Balaji Srinivasan. It identified the company’s founders as Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium and Shivani Mitra.
Hermes and Nous’s products
In the same July report, TechCrunch said Hermes shipped with built-in skills for web search, coding and image understanding, and was designed to learn from users’ activity and develop additional skills without manual intervention. The report also said Nous had released language models focused on coding and math.
Users can automate tasks with Hermes and chat with the agent or receive messages from it in apps such as Telegram and Discord, according to TechCrunch. Developers can run the software on a desktop or a virtual private server. The company also offers a cloud-hosted version, which TechCrunch described as an alternative for users who do not want to set up the agent on their own machines. At the time of that July report, the hosted service had paid tiers ranging from $20 to $200 a month.
In July, TechCrunch’s sources said the new funding would help Nous expand Hermes’ products and business model. Rolnick’s note says Nous will use the money to build and deliver Hermes for Businesses, which he wrote will let companies choose the best models at the best prices for their goals, scale their AI use safely and privately, and keep control of their institutional knowledge. In its post on X, the company added that it will build a mobile app.