Nous Research raises $90M at a $1.5B valuation and launches Hermes for Businesses

In short: Nous Research says it raised $90 million at a $1.5 billion valuation and is rolling out a business version of its Hermes AI agent.

What happened

Nous Research, a three-year-old startup, said it raised a $90 million Series B funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation. A valuation is an investor’s estimate of what a company is worth.

The round was led by Robot Ventures. Other investors named by the company include Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung, and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. Nous Research said the new round brings its total funding to $158 million.

The company is best known for Hermes, an open-source AI agent. Open-source means the underlying code is shared publicly, like a recipe anyone can copy and tweak. Nous says Hermes has been cloned more than 24 million times and accounts for about 2.5 percent of global AI token usage, based on the company’s estimates (tokens are small chunks of text that AI systems read and write).

Nous also announced “Hermes for Businesses.” It is meant to let companies set up customized AI agents that can carry out multi-step work, while keeping company data private and secure.

Why it matters

More companies want AI tools that can actually do tasks, not just answer questions, and they also want more control over where their data goes. A business-focused version of an AI agent is like giving a workplace a digital assistant that can follow a checklist across several steps, instead of a chatbot that only talks. If Nous can offer strong privacy controls and reliable performance, it could make open-source AI tools more common inside large organizations.

Source: TechCrunch AI