For three years Nous Research was the name you came across in the terminals of people who don’t settle for closed-box interfaces. Hermes Agent — the open-source agent released under the MIT licence — lived there, among command lines, persistent memory and skills that write themselves. Now that niche has a price: 1.5 billion dollars.

A $90 million round, led by Robot Ventures

On 7 October Nous Research confirmed a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, with Robot Ventures as lead investor. The round includes Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung and 1789 Capital, the venture firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner; other sources add Microsoft M12 and Y Combinator. Total funding rises to about 158 million. The figure is no surprise: it had been circulating since July, but back then it was a rumour, today it is a fact confirmed by the company in a note from CEO Dillon Rolnick.

Hermes for Businesses: the agent that walks into the company

The capital serves one clear goal: to bring Hermes inside organisations. Hermes for Businesses adds to the open-source product the tools companies demand before signing — private or on-premise deployment, single sign-on, audit, workspace controls, skills shared among team members, cost visibility and service agreements. The Enterprise version runs on the customer’s infrastructure; Business stays on Nous’s servers, but with a shared budget and per-user spending caps. Nous claims Enterprise is already live at some large companies, without naming them. The numbers that have been circulating for weeks are also company statements — more than 24 million clones and a share close to 2.5% of global token usage — that no independent source confirms.

The ecosystem widens: two plugins and a new interface

On the development side the hermes-agent repository keeps moving. Two official plugins have appeared: hermes-plugin-blender, which connects the agent to Blender Lab’s MCP server to drive modelling and rendering, and hermes-plugin-claude-subscription-directsdk, which routes Hermes turns through a Claude Pro or Max subscription via the official Claude Code CLI, with no separate API key. Meanwhile the community has produced “hermes-for-tern”, a native frontend for Tern by @fullctx: the same hermes command, but with animated responses, tool and subagent activity in real time and interactive approvals.

An open question

The question is no longer whether an open-source agent can compete with closed models, but whether it will manage to stay open while it learns to sell itself. Nous swears it will: the core stays MIT. The market, for now, believes it.

Verified sources: TechCrunch (7 ottobre 2026); SiliconANGLE (7 ottobre 2026); Startup Fortune (7 ottobre 2026); The Next Web (7 ottobre 2026); TAO Media (7 ottobre 2026); TokenPost (7 ottobre 2026); Nous Portal — Hermes Business (8 ottobre 2026); GitHub org NousResearch e catalogo plugin Hermes Agent — blender, claude-subscription-directsdk (8 ottobre 2026); X @fullctx e github.com/thefullctx/hermes-for-tern (8 ottobre 2026).