“Somehow, $90 million is modest in modern fundraising. We at Nous have always delivered more with less,” Dillon Rolnick, the chief executive of Nous Research, said as the company announced its latest funding round.
Nous, a three-year-old company formed in 2023 to build open-source AI models, has raised a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation. Robot Ventures led the round, joined by Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung, Microsoft’s M12, Y Combinator and 1789 Capital. Donald Trump Jr. is a partner at 1789 Capital. The investment brings Nous’s total funding to $158 million.
The company began by fine-tuning Meta’s Llama models with an emphasis on user-alignment. It also published YaRN, a method designed to give open models longer context windows at lower cost. Nous then built Hermes Agent throughout 2025.
Hermes Agent arrived under an MIT license in February and works across macOS, Windows and Linux, as well as apps including Telegram, Slack and WhatsApp. The agent has been cloned over 24 million times since release. Nous describes it as the world’s most widely used open source AI agent by many measures, and says its internal estimates put Hermes at approximately 2.5% of all global AI token usage.
Nous was at roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026 and expects to pass $100 million in revenue before the end of 2026. The new capital is intended to fund Hermes for Businesses, the company’s push into the enterprise sector.
That leaves Nous with the central commercial question facing many open-source software companies: whether broad use of a freely available product can support a business selling to companies. The company has not set out a launch timeline, product features or sales strategy for Hermes for Businesses.
For now, Nous is presenting openness as part of the proposition. “We’re building for everyone to own their intelligence, and we’re doing it in the open,” the company said.
Comments (0)