NousResearch raises $90M at $1.5B valuation on open-source Hermes agent
创业邦 · wechat · 2026-10-11
NousResearch, the company behind the open-source Hermes agent framework, raised $90M at a $1.5B valuation from NVIDIA, Microsoft's M12, Samsung and YC, bringing total funding to $158M.
- Hermes (MIT-licensed) runs on different underlying models and turns effective workflows into reusable "skills"; it has been cloned 24M+ times and may account for 2.5% of global AI token usage.
- Tencent Cloud's LightVela is built on Hermes with WeChat integration; Xiaomi's MiMo was a major model source (1.45T tokens/month via OpenRouter).
- Monetization: Nous Portal aggregates 300+ models with free/$20/$100/$200 tiers plus cloud hosting from $0.56/day and enterprise deployment services.
- ARR was $36M as of Sept 2026, projected to exceed $100M by year-end; the piece also covers the open-source monetization dilemma and similar托管-revenue探索 by Moonshot (Kimi) and Alibaba Cloud.
Related event: Nous Research Raises $90M at $1.5B Valuation(2 posts)→
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