Nous Research has completed a $90 million Series B financing at a $1.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Robot Ventures, with Nvidia, Microsoft M12, Samsung and Union Square Ventures (USV) among the investors. The company’s total funding has reached about $158 million.
The fresh capital is mainly intended to move Hermes, the open-source agent that took off among developers this year, into the enterprise market. Hermes has been downloaded 22.7 million times since its release in February. Data from OpenRouter shows its usage has already surpassed OpenClaw.
Hermes stays free and open source
Nous is not selling enterprises a separate closed agent. Hermes itself will remain free and open under the MIT license. Enterprise users can choose their own models and deploy the system either in their own cloud environments or on local servers.
On top of that base product, Nous is adding the features companies typically need, including single sign-on, employee permissions, workspace isolation, auditing, cost management, and integrations with Slack and Teams. The first enterprise deployments have already started.
Business model comes into focus
Nous said its annualized revenue was about $36 million in mid-September, and the company expects that figure to exceed $100 million later this year.
The revenue model is becoming clearer: Hermes remains free and open source, while Nous charges for models, tools, cloud hosting and enterprise management. What began as an open-source agent aimed at developers has already reached $36 million in annualized revenue. The next step is to test whether that model can scale further inside enterprises.