Startups

Nous Research closes $90M Series B at $1.5B, opens Hermes for Businesses at $20–$200 a month

The open-source agent lab's new paid tier puts a private, model-choice agent inside reach of small B2B teams that have been priced out of enterprise AI.

By Giulia Donatello· Startups & funding·2026-10-13·3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Chris Ried — A computer screen displaying lines of open-source code

Nous Research closed a $90 million Series B on October 7, 2026 at a $1.5B valuation, led by Robot Ventures, and used the same morning to open commercial tiers of its Hermes agent at $20 to $200 per month. Nvidia, Samsung, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Y Combinator, Microsoft’s M12, and 1789 Capital (where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner) joined the round, bringing total funding to $158 million.

The pricing is the news. Capable agentic infrastructure has, until now, been priced for enterprise procurement. A five-to-thirty-person B2B team evaluating prospect research, outreach drafting, or follow-up sequences has had to choose between consumer chat tools and six-figure platform contracts. Hermes for Businesses collapses that gap.

Two tiers sit on top of the open-source Hermes Agent, released under MIT license in February 2026. Hermes Business, per Startup Fortune, offers a shared credit balance through the Nous Portal, per-member spending caps, and a shared skill library. Hermes Enterprise lets a company run the entire stack on its own infrastructure or private cloud, with single sign-on. Built-in model routing lets customers point agents at Claude or Nous’s own Hermes 4 series, fine-tuned on 5 million synthetically generated records via an internal tool called DataForge.

The commercial traction is already there. TechCrunch, citing the Wall Street Journal, reports Nous hit roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026 and expects to clear $100 million before year-end. By the company’s own count, Hermes has been downloaded more than 24 million times, drawn several thousand open-source contributors, and now accounts for an estimated 2.5% of global token consumption.

CEO Dillon Rolnick, who published a company note the same day, framed the thesis directly: “tomorrow’s moats will be built around execution, trust, and extensibility,” and the business tier is designed to “cut your spend by letting you choose the best models at the best prices for your goals.”

The three-year-old lab, founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra, raised its $50 million Series A from Paradigm in April 2025 at a roughly $1 billion token valuation. Eighteen months later, the model-agnostic, bring-your-own-infrastructure posture that read as ideology now reads as the sales pitch.

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