Nous Research has raised $90 million to build AI that serves people, not gatekeepers. Chief executive Dillon Rolnick announced the round in a note on the company's site, naming NVIDIA, Microsoft's M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, and Menlo Ventures among the investors. Robot Ventures led the round, according to reports, and the Wall Street Journal puts the company's valuation at $1.5 billion, per The Next Web.

The money has a clear destination: Hermes for Businesses. Nous describes it as the agent that grows with you, extended to companies. It lets a business pick the best models at the best prices for each job, scale its AI use privately, and build what the company calls a corpus of intelligence from the bottom up. The pitch is simple: your company should own its intelligence stack instead of renting it from a walled garden.

That framing runs through the whole note. Nous says it formed in 2023 to fight the drift toward centralized, gate-kept AI, and argues open systems are "safer" because they can be audited, not because someone stands guard over them. The lab started by fine-tuning Meta's Llama models to follow the individual user's worldview, pioneered synthetic data and open-source tool calling, and published YaRN, a trick that gave open models far longer context windows. Hermes Agent followed, released under the MIT license this past February, and Nous claims it has since been cloned more than 24 million times and drives roughly 2.5% of all global token usage by its own internal estimates. Those figures come from Nous and have not been independently verified.

Friendly reminder that Hermes was never built or intended to be exclusively for the "personal assistant" agent that can just read your emails and nothing else. I fully intend and have plainly stated many times that I always built hermes to be the most powerful AI Agent. "Normie" consumers can leverage that and we do what we can to make it an experience they can approach (the mobile app will be almost exclusively focused on consumer) - but they are not our only demographic. I want the scientists, the cybersecurity engineers, the developers, the knowledge workers, the creatives, and everyone else to be able to have an agent that they can leverage that is maximally useful to them too. Not just your mom. (She called btw you need to make your bed)

— Teknium 🪽 (@Teknium) October 7, 2026

Co-founder Teknium put the same point more bluntly on X: Hermes was always meant to be the most powerful AI agent, not a glorified inbox reader. Scientists, cybersecurity engineers, developers, knowledge workers, and creatives are all first-class users in his telling, with a consumer-focused mobile app handling the mainstream. The post has pulled over 120,000 views, which suggests the message landed.

The ecosystem around Hermes has been building for a while. Herald OS recently put Hermes Agent at the center of an open-source desktop, and the community's voice is loud enough that an OpenClaw jab drew a "rent free" reply from the Hermes side. A $90 million war chest now turns that volunteer energy into a business with enterprise ambitions, and the open-source world will be watching whether the MIT-licensed core stays as open as the rhetoric.

If Nous pulls it off, businesses get an agent they can inspect, modify, and run where they choose, backed by a company with real funding. If not, it becomes another cautionary tale about open ideals meeting enterprise price tags. Either way, the next chapter of Hermes will be written in the open, which is exactly where its fans can read it.