Nous Research raises $90 million for Hermes business agents

Nous Research raised $90 million to bring its Hermes AI agent to businesses, the company announced. Nvidia, Microsoft’s M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Menlo Ventures were among the investors it named.

Nous plans to use the financing to build and deliver Hermes for Businesses. The offering is intended to let companies choose where the agent runs and which AI models it uses. Nous is pitching that control, together with auditability and model choice, as an alternative to centralized AI services.

The company said it released Hermes Agent under the MIT license in February 2026. It describes Hermes as an agent that can remember projects, create reusable skills and carry knowledge between sessions. Those capabilities are designed to support work across multiple interactions while keeping the software configurable by its users.

Nous said Hermes had been cloned more than 24 million times, had attracted thousands of contributors and, by its internal estimate, accounted for about 2.5% of global token usage. The announcement did not provide an independently auditable methodology for those figures. They remain company claims, not verified measures of adoption.

For the business product, Nous said customers would be able to select models based on price and goals while keeping AI use private. The company expects Hermes for Businesses to reduce spending and improve safety, privacy and institutional knowledge, but it did not provide independent customer results supporting those claims.