Nous Research Secures $90M Funding, Launches AI Agents

Nous Research Inc., the developer behind the popular Hermes AI agent, has announced that it has raised $90 million in funding, bringing its valuation to $1.5 billion. The Series B funding round was led by Robot Ventures, with participation from notable investors including Nvidia, Samsung Electronics, and Y Combinator. The Hermes AI agent has gained significant traction, being downloaded over 24 million times and accounting for approximately 2.5% of global AI token consumption. This desktop application allows users to interact with their files and access various programs on their machines. It utilizes popular large language models (LLMs) such as Claude and offers customized versions developed by Nous. The latest Hermes 4 series is fine-tuned using a dataset of 5 million synthetically generated records, enhancing its reasoning capabilities. Nous Research plans to use the new funding to expand its enterprise offerings with "Hermes for Businesses," enabling companies to deploy customized AI agents that can manage multi-step workflows while maintaining data privacy and security. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Nous generated $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026 and expects to exceed $100 million by the end of the year.