Open-source agent firm NousResearch raises $90M at $1.5B valuation
快鲤鱼 · wechat · 2026-10-11
NousResearch, the company behind the open-source agent framework Hermes, raised $90M at a $1.5B valuation led by Robot Ventures, with NVIDIA, Microsoft's M12, Samsung and Y Combinator participating — bringing total funding to $158M.
Hermes (MIT-licensed) lets developers call multiple underlying models while persisting effective workflows as reusable skills. It hit 271B daily tokens on OpenRouter in May and has been cloned over 24M times; Tencent Cloud's LightVela is built on it and Xiaomi's MiMo was a key model source, though neither is a paid partnership. Monetization runs through a Nous Portal unified account ($0/$20/$100/$200 tiers), per-day cloud hosting from $0.56/day, and enterprise deployment services. Annualized revenue was $36M as of mid-September 2026, projected above $100M by year-end. The piece notes open-source popularity doesn't equal revenue, citing GLM-5.3Flash's official serving share on OpenRouter dropping from 88% to 22%.
Related event: Nous Research Raises $90M at $1.5B Valuation(2 posts)→
More from coding & agent
- AgentTime benchmark: agents' runtime control varies 2.4x, Astra sleeps to use its time budget — maksym_andr · 2026-10-12
- Hu Yanbin built a stage light-beam instrument using ByteDance's TRAE coding tool — vista8 · 2026-10-12
- JetBrains paper: coding-agent benchmarks should match real users' task flows — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-10-12
- Dev is building an AGPL-licensed self-hostable Overleaf alternative — AlpinDale · 2026-10-12
- mitsuhiko's weekend 'software factory' with his kids shows how good AI coding models have gotten — mitsuhiko · 2026-10-12
- agent-seat: an MCP server that gives your computer-use AI its own Windows desktop session — Fun-Instruction-3430 · 2026-10-12