动察 Beating AI News Flash: Nous Research has completed a $90 million Series B funding round, reaching a valuation of $1.5 billion. Robot Ventures led the round, with participation from Nvidia, Microsoft M12, Samsung, USV, and others. The company has raised approximately $158 million in total. The new funds will mainly be used to push Hermes, which went viral in developer circles this year, into the enterprise market.
Since its release in February, Hermes has been downloaded 22.7 million times. OpenRouter data shows that its usage has already surpassed OpenClaw. Nous had an annualized revenue of about $36 million in mid-September, and the company expects to exceed $100 million later this year.
What Nous sells to enterprises is not another closed Agent system. Hermes itself remains free and MIT open source, and enterprises can choose their own models or deploy it on their own cloud or local servers. Nous adds the things enterprises need on top of it, including SSO, employee permissions, workspace isolation, auditing, cost management, and Slack and Teams integration. The first batch of enterprise deployments has already begun.
Its business model is also fairly clear: Hermes is free and open source, while Nous charges for models, tools, cloud hosting, and enterprise management. An open-source Agent originally aimed at developers has already achieved $36 million in annualized revenue, and now it needs to continue proving whether this model can scale in enterprises.

