IndustryWednesday, October 7, 2026Trended 2 nights
Nous Research Series B: $90M at $1.5B, Hermes for Businesses, mobile app
Nous announced a $90M Series B led by Robot Ventures, with Nvidia, Microsoft M12, Samsung, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, Menlo Ventures, and others. Valuation is $1.5B. Capital is aimed at Hermes Agent enterprise controls (SSO, permissions, workspace isolation, audit, cost management, Slack/Teams) and a mobile app. Founder note says Hermes has been cloned 24M+ times and, by internal estimate, drives about 2.5% of global token usage. TechCrunch reports ~$36M annualized revenue by mid-September and a company expectation of passing $100M before year-end (WSJ figure, not independently checked here). WSJ, via Yuliya Chernova, also says Hermes overtook OpenClaw and other open-source assistants by usage on OpenRouter.
Why it matters
This is the capital and product fork builders need to plan around: MIT core stays, enterprise packaging and a phone client are now funded. The OpenRouter usage claim, if it holds, reframes the Hermes vs OpenClaw comparison from “which repo” to “which surface people actually run.”
