Nous Research, the startup behind the viral open-source AI agent Hermes, has raised $90 million in a Series B round at a $1.5 billion valuation, and is now pushing its product into the enterprise market — moving from a developer-community hit to a business service.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the round was led by Robot Ventures, with participation from Nvidia, Microsoft's M12 venture arm, and Samsung, alongside Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures and others. One new investor is 1789 Capital. With this round, Nous's total funding reaches roughly $158 million.
"I think that businesses should have a level of ownership over their own destinies," said Dillon Rolnick, chief executive of Nous. The bet is straightforward: corporate customers want open-source architecture — more control over their data and less dependence on any single software provider.
Hermes went viral among software developers this year, racking up about 22.7 million downloads since February. Per OpenRouter, a platform tracking adoption of AI models and software, Hermes has overtaken OpenClaw — another open-source AI assistant that became a phenomenon among techies at the start of the year — by usage.
Open code is the engine of its popularity. Hermes's code can be inspected, downloaded, and modified by anyone. Rolnick argues that is the best way to ensure AI safety, rather than handing everything to a black box.
Unlike an ordinary chatbot, Hermes ships with built-in "skills": web search, coding and execution, and image understanding. More importantly, it is designed to automatically learn from people's usage and develop new skills without manual software updates.
It can run on a user's desktop or a virtual private server, and can be called through Telegram or Discord. Nous also offers cloud-hosted infrastructure, with tiers from $20 to $200 per month, spinning up an always-on AI agent in under a minute.
Outside the open-source camp, proprietary versions are accelerating: Meta launched its own Muse bot, and early-stage startups like Instinct are bringing closed-source versions to market. AI assistants are designed to perform tasks on the internet and make people more efficient, but they typically come with cost and security trade-offs — which is exactly where the open-source and closed-source approaches collide.
"They caught our attention as we were watching the OpenRouter charts," said Peter Lenke, managing partner at M12. "That was helpful to see the viral adoption… It's a great indication of its value and utility."
Nous was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium and Shivani Mitra. Before this round, it had raised roughly $70 million from investors including Paradigm; less than three months ago it closed a $50 million Series A, and the valuation has now stepped up again.
From developer hit to enterprise service, the Hermes repository has accumulated roughly 214,000 GitHub stars and nearly 40,000 forks, ranking among the most popular open-source AI projects. The question is simple: with $90 million in fresh ammunition, can it win corporate customers away from the closed-source giants?