Nous Research raises $90 million and aims Hermes at companies

Nous Research says it has raised $90 million and will spend it on a business version of Hermes Agent. Chief executive Dillon Rolnick’s note says the company “raised $90 million to create AI that serves the people,” with “NVIDIA, Microsoft’s M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, and Menlo Ventures among others.” The note says “among others,” so the list is not complete.

The note does not state a valuation, a round label, or a revenue figure. TNW, citing The Wall Street Journal, reports that the round values Nous at $1.5 billion, and writes that Nous did not give a valuation.

Rolnick writes: “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.”

What Hermes Agent is

The note describes the agent in one stretch. “We built Hermes Agent to learn: the more you use it, the better it gets. Users choose where Hermes Agent runs and which models it uses. It remembers projects, writes reusable skills as it works, and carries that knowledge across sessions.”

Nous says it “released Hermes Agent with an MIT license this past February.” The LICENSE file in the hermes-agent repository is the MIT License, copyright 2025 Nous Research. The note’s claim that Hermes is “the most widely used open source AI agent in the world” “by many metrics” is Nous’s own estimate.

The numbers Nous prints, and the number TNW attributes

The note says: “Today, Hermes has been cloned over 24 million times and, to our best internal estimates, drives approximately 2.5% of all global token usage.” Both the clone count and the token share are Nous’s, and the token share is explicitly an internal estimate.

TNW, again citing The Wall Street Journal, reports more than 22 million downloads since February. “Cloned over 24 million times” is the sentence in the Nous note. “More than 22 million downloads” is TNW’s account of the Journal. Clones and downloads are different measures, so the two figures are not interchangeable.

What Hermes for Businesses adds, in Nous’s words

The note says the money and new partners will “build and deliver Hermes for Businesses.” The description that follows is about control and cost, as Nous states it. The agent “will empower businesses that improve on and own their own intelligence stacks.” It “will cut your spend by letting you choose the best models at the best prices for your goals, and it will give you the heuristics to make those decisions.” It “will let your AI use scale safely and privately.” It “will help you build a corpus of intelligence bottoms-up” and “give you dominion over your institutional knowledge.”

A shorter line on the same page: “Hermes Business extends that principle to companies.” The principle, as the note states it, is that “the people using an AI system should control it.”

The note does not add a price list.

What the note leaves out

Nous’s note does not name a lead investor, does not call the round a Series B, and does not print revenue. A developer can read the MIT license on Hermes Agent, the choice of where it runs and which models it calls, and the plan for a business version that keeps model choice, privacy, and company knowledge on the customer’s side.