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Nous Research Lands $90M to Take Hermes From Hobbyists to HQ

AI Tech News

Nous Research Lands $90M to Take Hermes From Hobbyists to HQ

· By aiuser

In Greek myth, Hermes was the messenger god: fast, clever, and a bit of a trickster. In 2026, Hermes is an open-source AI agent that has been cloned more than 24 million times, and its makers just raised enough money to buy it a business suit.

$1.5 Billion Says Open Source Can Scale

TechCrunch reports that Nous Research closed a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Robot Ventures. Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Samsung are among the other backers. That brings the three-year-old startup's total funding to about $158 million.

The money will fund Hermes for Businesses, an enterprise version of the open-source Hermes Agent. It lets companies deploy customized AI agents for multi-step workflows while keeping their data private and under their control. Nous says the open-source agent drives about 2.5% of global AI token usage. Its annualized revenue was about $36 million in mid-September, and it expects to pass $100 million by the end of the year.

Agents Are Leaving the Lab

For businesses, the big takeaway is that agents built on open-source foundations are a serious option now, not just a weekend project. "Keep your data under your own control" is the line that gets past the compliance team, and it hits the main worry slowing down enterprise AI adoption: nobody wants their customer records turning into somebody else's training data.

What's easy to overlook is that it's the agent framework getting the investment, not a model. The value is moving from "which LLM is smartest?" to "what can it reliably do inside my systems?" That means connecting to your CMS, CRM, and internal tools with the right permissions and guardrails. It's integration work, and it decides whether an AI pilot becomes something that ships.

Hermes has its wings and its funding. Now it needs a job in your actual workflows.

If Hermes for Businesses has you thinking about which of your workflows an agent could take on, our team can help you scope and build the integration without giving up control of your data.

Source: TechCrunch