Investment

Nous Research Raises $90 Million for Open-Source A.I. Agent Hermes

co-produced by AI08. October 2026, 08:27

Give the agent away, charge the companies: Nous Research, the start-up behind the open-source A.I. agent Hermes, has closed its new funding round. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company raised $90 million (about €77 million) in a Series B at a valuation of $1.5 billion, or roughly €1.28 billion.

Robot Ventures led the round, and Nvidia, Microsoft’s venture arm M12 and Samsung also took part, the report said. Over the summer, talks were said to center on at least $75 million, as Trending Topics reported. The final amount came in higher, at the same valuation.

From Community Project to Unicorn

Nous Research was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium and Shivani Mitra. Before this round, the start-up had raised about $70 million (about €60 million) from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital and Balaji Srinivasan. Paradigm led a $50 million Series A in the spring of 2025. The new money brings total funding to roughly $160 million, or about €137 million.

The company has its roots in the open-source community and the crypto world. Alongside its agent, Nous has released its own open language models focused on coding and math, and it experiments with decentralized A.I. training.

What Hermes Can Do

Hermes is an open-source agent that browses the web, edits files, writes code and learns new skills from the way people use it. Users can also control it through messaging apps such as Telegram and Discord, and the agents can run around the clock. Its reach is considerable:

Downloads: Hermes has been downloaded more than 22.7 million times since February, according to The Journal.
GitHub: By the summer, the project had about 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks.
Pricing: The hosted version costs $20 to $200 (about €17 to €171) a month.

The Business Model: Open to Everyone, Paid for by Companies

The key question is how to make money from an agent anyone can download for free. Nous is betting on an open-core model: The software stays open, while hosting, security, management and support for businesses come at a price. That is where the new capital is meant to go.

Revenue is climbing fast, at least by the company’s account. Annualized revenue stood at $36 million (about €31 million) in mid-September, and management expects it to top $100 million, roughly €85 million, by the end of the year. That is Nous’s own forecast. Whether developer enthusiasm turns into lasting corporate budgets remains to be seen.

The Competition: OpenClaw and the Big Agent Platforms

Hermes launched just weeks after the OpenClaw hype and is considered its direct rival. OpenClaw was created by the Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, who has since joined OpenAI. His project is set to live on as open source under a foundation, as Trending Topics reported. The race for A.I. agents is much broader, though:

OpenClaw: Mr. Steinberger’s agent is the most popular open-source project of its kind and is backed by OpenAI.
Cognition: The maker of the coding agent Devin raised more than $1 billion in May at a valuation of $26 billion (about €22 billion).
Replit: The coding start-up raised $400 million in March at a $9 billion valuation (about €7.7 billion) and introduced Agent 4.
Mistral AI: The French A.I. champion also relies on open models and is expanding its agent offerings for businesses.

For Nous, the new round is above all a mandate: The community reach is there, and now the start-up has to prove that companies will pay for an open agent just as they pay for the closed products of the big A.I. labs.