Analysis
Nous Research confirmed it closed a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, settling the funding talks Pulse first covered in July when TechCrunch reported the open-source AI lab was negotiating a round at that same mark. Robot Ventures led the new round, with Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung and 1789 Capital, the fund where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner, also participating, per TechCrunch.
The three-year-old company's total funding now stands at $158 million.
What changed since July
The July report covered active negotiations at the $1.5 billion mark; this week's news confirms the round actually closed, adds the final size ($90 million Series B) and discloses the full investor list for the first time, none of which the earlier report could say. Nous Research also used the announcement to launch "Hermes for Businesses," a new product letting companies deploy customized AI agents for multi-step workflows while keeping their data private.
Traction behind the valuation
The company's open-source Hermes Agent has been cloned more than 24 million times by its own estimate, and Nous Research says it drives roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage. Annualized revenue was about $36 million as of mid-September, according to The Wall Street Journal, with the company projecting it will pass $100 million before the end of 2026 as the new enterprise product rolls out.
What the confirmation doesn't settle: TechCrunch's report names no competitors directly, but Nous Research operates in the same open-source AI ecosystem as Mistral and Hugging Face, both of which have also been racing to monetize open-weight models through enterprise tooling rather than the open models themselves. Whether Hermes for Businesses converts the company's open-source developer base into paying enterprise accounts, rather than cannibalizing free usage, is the question the next revenue update will answer.
