Nous Research Raises $90 Million at $1.5 Billion Valuation
The recording, obtained by Axios from a private fundraiser last month, surfaced Wednesday — hours before Trump was set to campaign with him in Texas.
Nous Research raised $90 million on Wednesday to bring its open-source AI assistant to business customers. The Series B round values the startup at $1.5 billion.
Robot Ventures led the round, Axios reported. Nvidia, Microsoft's M12 venture arm and Samsung participated, along with Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Y Combinator. One new investor is 1789 Capital, a venture firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner.
The company's best-known product is Hermes, an open-source AI agent that can browse the web, run code and learn skills from its users. The Wall Street Journal reported that Hermes has been downloaded about 22.7 million times since February, passing OpenClaw — another open-source assistant that took off earlier this year — in usage tracked by OpenRouter.
Nous plans to use the money to expand Hermes for corporate customers and build a mobile app, the company said. The software itself stays open: its GitHub repository carries an MIT license, and anyone can run it on their own machines. Nous makes money by selling hosted access and enterprise services around it.
A test for open source
The bet is that companies will pay for open software they could run themselves. Open-source tools can spread fast without earning much. Nous says developers use Hermes because they can inspect the code and control their own data, and it is counting on businesses wanting the same.
“I think that businesses should have a level of ownership over their own destinies,” Dillon Rolnick, the company's chief executive, told the Journal. Rolnick said an open-source product whose code users can inspect and modify is the best way to keep an AI assistant safe.
Management expects annualized revenue to pass $100 million by year-end, up from $36 million in mid-September, according to the Journal. That is the company's own forecast, not reported revenue.
From fringe to funded
Nous was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan “Teknium” and Shivani Mitra. Its early reputation came from open work fine-tuning Meta's Llama models, and the company says it formed to resist the concentration of AI behind closed products.
TechCrunch reported in July that Nous was finalizing a round of at least $75 million at the same $1.5 billion valuation. The round that closed Wednesday landed at $90 million. Including this one, the company has raised about $158 million.
“They caught our attention as we were watching the OpenRouter charts,” said Peter Lenke, a managing partner at M12, Microsoft's venture arm. “That was helpful to see the viral adoption. It's a great indication of its value and utility.”
