Nous Research closes $90M Series B at $1.5B, pairs raise…

The Wall Street Journal first reported the round on October 7; Nous bundled it with a business packaging of its MIT-licensed Hermes Agent, which the company says has been cloned 24 million times and drives roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage.

Nous Research confirmed a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation on October 7, hours after The Wall Street Journal first reported the round, and used the same morning to formally launch Hermes for Businesses, a packaging of the MIT-licensed agent it released in February. Robot Ventures led, with Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung, and 1789 Capital participating. Total funding sits at roughly $158 million.

The sequencing matters. Nous shipped the open-source Hermes Agent in February, launched a Hermes Business tier in mid-September, hit roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by that point (per the Journal, via TechCrunch), and expects to cross $100 million before year-end. The $1.5B mark lands as validation of a motion that was already underway, not a bet on one that hadn’t started.

What Nous is selling, structurally, is a counter-position to the closed enterprise agent contract. Hermes Agent, per The Next Web, keeps persistent memory across sessions, writes reusable skills as it works, lets users pick which models it runs, and connects to Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, macOS, Windows, and Linux. The company says it’s been cloned more than 24 million times and accounts for roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage, a figure Startup Fortune flags as not independently verified.

Pricing reinforces the pitch. RuntimeWire reports Nous Portal lists individual plans at $20, $100, and $200 per month plus a free tier, with SSO, SLAs, and on-prem sold separately. The mid-September Business tier adds a shared credit balance, per-member spending caps, and a shared library where employee-written skills accumulate.

That’s a materially different proposition from the agent protocols coming out of larger platforms, including Meta and Sierra’s Personal Agent Protocol and Amazon’s opening of Seller Central to agents. Those routes assume a platform owner; Nous assumes a messaging thread.

Whether paid business adoption follows developer adoption is, as Startup Fortune puts it, the open question this raise is betting on.

Nous Research closes $90M Series B at $1.5B, pairs raise with Hermes for Businesses launch

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