Nous Research is no longer just the open-source lab that made popular an agent able to remember, write code and execute tasks on its own. On 7 October the company confirmed a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Robot Ventures and backed by names such as Nvidia, Microsoft’s M12, Samsung, Union Square Ventures and Menlo Ventures. Total funding thus rises to about $158 million.

From open source to selling to companies

The capital does not finance abstract research but a product: “Hermes for Businesses”, the version built for companies, which lets them deploy customised agents on complex workflows while keeping their data private and their choice of model free. It is a significant change of posture. Hermes built its reputation as a free tool and was cloned millions of times; now it is trying to monetise the same technical base in the enterprise market, where control, compliance and independence from the vendor are what count. The Wall Street Journal reports annualised revenue of around 36 million at mid-September, with the aim of passing 100 million by the end of the year. These are numbers that justify the enthusiasm, but also the expectations.

Models on display on the platform

On the Nous Portal the distribution strategy stays aggressive. In recent days “MISSINGNO.” appeared, a stealth model for coding and agentic reasoning described as very token-efficient, free for a limited time. On 9 October StepFun’s Step 5 Preview also arrived, a MoE with 600 billion total parameters and 27 billion active, a context of one million tokens, offered free for a week. On that one Nous published and then corrected the Hermes Index score: from 33.89 to 32.83, just behind GPT-6 Luna and GLM 5.3 Flash. The transparency about the correction is worth as much as the figure itself.

The discipline of a stable release

On the technical side, v0.21.6 of 8 October is the first release produced by the new stable release pipeline, with a tested Docker image and a receipt tag at publication. It is not a glamorous detail, but it is the kind of discipline you need when your customers become companies.

Conclusion

Nous is attempting the hardest transition: staying faithful to its open-source identity while building an enterprise business. The valuation says investors believe it. The game now turns on the ability to serve companies without betraying the community that made Hermes what it is.

Verified sources: techcrunch.com (7 October 2026); startupfortune.com and techfundingnews.com on the round and the valuation (7 October 2026); ground.news/Digg on revenue and downloads (7 October 2026); nousresearch.com and X @NousResearch on MISSINGNO. (10 October 2026) and Step 5 Preview with the score correction (9 October 2026); github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent releases on v0.21.6 (8 October 2026).