Nous Research

AI · Open-Source · Enterprise Software

Funding

Nous Research raises $90M at $1.5B valuation for Hermes AI agent

An open-source agent with 214,000 GitHub stars and a cult developer following is now pivoting toward paid enterprise tooling.

• Nous Research closed a $90 million funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation, aiming to bring its open-source Hermes AI agent to enterprise customers, according to The Wall Street Journal.
• Nous Research built Hermes, an open-source AI agent that runs locally or in the cloud with built-in skills like web search, coding and image understanding, and that can learn new capabilities from how users interact with it.
• The round was led by Robot Ventures and Union Square Ventures, backers that had been reported in talks to fund the deal ahead of its close.
• Hermes has drawn more than 214,000 GitHub stars and nearly 40,000 forks, with cloud-hosted subscription tiers ranging from $20 to $200 a month.
• Nous Research just launched the Hermes Index, a leaderboard scoring frontier models on both accuracy and dollar cost per task, pushing beyond its own agent into AI benchmarking.
• The $1.5 billion valuation signals investors believe a community-driven, open-source AI agent can still command premium enterprise economics against closed-source rivals.