Nous Research posts a $90M raise. The $1.5B valuation is on the wires, not the company note

What is on Nous’s own fundraise note?

The page “A Note on Our Fundraise” is signed Dillon Rolnick, CEO, and dated October 2026 with no day. The first sentence says Nous Research raised $90 million. The investors named in that paragraph are NVIDIA, Microsoft’s M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, and Menlo Ventures, “among others.” The note does not use the words Series B, lead investor, or valuation.

Rolnick writes that the firm was formed in 2023 against “centralization and walled gardens,” that early work was post-training on Meta’s Llama models, and that YaRN was a published long-context method. He says Hermes Agent shipped under an MIT license “this past February,” that users pick where it runs and which models it uses, and that it “remembers projects, writes reusable skills as it works, and carries that knowledge across sessions.”

This is a financing and product-roadmap note, not a model card. For what “agent” usually means in that copy, see our guide to AI agents. For keeping a vendor number in its column, see how to read an AI company announcement.

What did the 7 October wires add?

TechCrunch’s 7 October story says Nous “has raised a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, confirming TechCrunch’s earlier reporting.” It names Robot Ventures as lead, with Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung, and 1789 Capital, “where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner.” It puts total funding at $158 million. SiliconANGLE the same day also uses $90 million, Robot Ventures as lead, a $1.5 billion valuation, and names Nvidia, Samsung, Y Combinator “and several others.”

The investor lists do not match. Nous’s note includes Microsoft’s M12 and does not name 1789 Capital or a lead. TechCrunch names 1789 and a lead and omits M12. SiliconANGLE omits M12 and 1789. We are using the company page for names Nous stated, and the wires for the Series B, lead, valuation, and total-raised figures they report.

TechCrunch and SiliconANGLE both attribute revenue to The Wall Street Journal: about $36 million annualized by mid-September 2026, with the company expecting to pass $100 million before year-end. Those sentences are not on the Nous note we opened. We did not open the Journal article.

What is Hermes Agent on the product pages?

The Hermes Agent site we opened on 9 October calls it “The Agent That Grows With You.” It offers a desktop app for macOS 12+, Windows 10/11, and Linux, plus a terminal install command. A pricing FAQ says the agent is “free and open source under the MIT license,” that model providers and optional hosted services have their own prices, and that cloud hosting is optional.

Feature blocks on that page list chat surfaces (Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, email, CLI), persistent memory and auto-generated skills, scheduled unattended tasks, isolated subagents, web and browser tools, and “five backends” for sandboxing: local, Docker, SSH, Singularity, and Modal. Nous Portal is sold as paid tiers with monthly credits and “200+” models. We did not run the install script or create a Portal account.

SiliconANGLE’s product paragraph, which is journalism rather than the company note, says Hermes ships as a desktop app that can touch local files, use a browser, and run code in Docker, that it can call models such as Claude as well as Nous’s own Hermes 4 line, and that a router picks a model using cost, speed, and quality. Treat those details as SiliconANGLE’s summary unless they also appear on a Nous page you have open.

What is Hermes for Businesses?

The fundraise note says the new capital “will build and deliver Hermes for Businesses,” so companies can “improve on and own their own intelligence stacks,” choose models and prices, and keep institutional knowledge. The Portal page “Hermes for your Business,” which we opened the same day, is a marketing layout: shared skills across a team, “spend intelligence” across models, and compounding memory. A separate Enterprise block says customers can “run Hermes Enterprise on infrastructure you control” with tailored deployment, SSO, SLAs, and “white-glove onboarding.”

SiliconANGLE writes that Hermes Business and Hermes Enterprise let administrators set team token limits and let users share customizations, and that Hermes Cloud launches a hosted agent without local setup. The Cloud page is a different URL; we used SiliconANGLE for that packaging, not a Cloud signup. None of these pages, on the copies we opened, publish a price list or a general-availability date for the business SKU.

Which popularity numbers are estimates?

Nous’s note says Hermes “has been cloned over 24 million times” and, “to our best internal estimates, drives approximately 2.5% of all global token usage.” TechCrunch repeats both figures as “according to the startup’s estimates.” SiliconANGLE uses “downloaded more than 24 million times” and the same 2.5% token line. Those are company estimates, not a public telemetry dashboard we opened.

The same caution applies to “the most widely used open source AI agent in the world,” which is Rolnick’s line, and to the Journal revenue figures that appear only through the wires. A clone count is not monthly active use. A token-share estimate is not a billed-revenue share.

What did we not verify?

We opened the undated October company note, the 7 October TechCrunch and SiliconANGLE stories, the Hermes Agent homepage, and the Portal business page. We did not open a term sheet, a Journal login, a Hermes 4 model card, or the MIT license file on GitHub. We did not install the agent or buy Portal credits. Treat $90 million as what Nous wrote, $1.5 billion and Series B as what the wires wrote, and Hermes for Businesses as a stated use of proceeds plus a marketing page.