A Note on Our Fundraise

Nous Research raised $90 million to create AI that serves the people. We brought together some of the strongest investors in technology – NVIDIA, Microsoft’s M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, and Menlo Ventures among others – to advance our mission, and to bring that mission to new domains.

Somehow, $90 million is modest in modern fundraising. We at Nous have always delivered more with less, and we are proud of our resourcefulness in an age of waste.

We formed Nous in 2023 to combat the seemingly inexorable trend dragging AI toward centralization and walled gardens. We believed the consequences of gate-kept access to the world’s most powerful technology would be borne by everyone, while the benefits would accrue to a few. We also believed that the very technology we were creating could empower everyone, leading to a flourishing of individuality. Today, we worry that the conversation is being dominated by fearmongering pleas for sweeping regulation, pleas that appear aligned with, if not motivated by, financial interests. This capital will go towards building the alternative: open, competitive, “safer” because of its auditability and not because of its gate-keepers.

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As a group of upstarts with few resources and no pedigrees or resumes except the work we did in the open, we found post-training was the layer where we could have the biggest impact. We fine-tuned Meta's Llama models to emphasize user-alignment: the idea that the model should adhere strictly to the worldviews espoused by the individual user, not imparted top down from a company or entity. We pioneered synthetic data, defined open source tool calling, and proved that smaller development teams could build fine-tuned models competitive with much larger labs.

In our early years, we published YaRN, a method that gave open models much longer context windows with far less additional cost. Long context meant a model could work across more of a conversation, document, or codebase at once. We believed that innovation would help to unlock the agentic interactions we envisioned.

Throughout 2025, we worked on an agent stack to advance our own efforts. We built Hermes Agent to learn: the more you use it, the better it gets. Users choose where Hermes Agent runs and which models it uses. It remembers projects, writes reusable skills as it works, and carries that knowledge across sessions. We released Hermes Agent with an MIT license this past February, because we believe tomorrow's moats will be built around execution, trust, and extensibility.

The marginal cost to reproduce a piece of software has plummeted. There are few benefits to keeping a technology like Hermes Agent locked down and many to proliferating it. Users don’t want lock-in and they deserve observability into the thing they will allow into so many aspects of their lives. Hermes as an open ecosystem gives them a foundation of trust.

Today, Hermes has been cloned over 24 million times and, to our best internal estimates, drives approximately 2.5% of all global token usage. Thousands of contributors have since helped build it, and thousands more have built on top of it. By many metrics it is the most widely used open source AI agent in the world.

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We believe businesses of all sizes want the same liberties. With our fundraising and new partners, we will build and deliver Hermes for Businesses. The agent that grows with you will empower businesses that improve on and own their own intelligence stacks. It will cut your spend by letting you choose the best models at the best prices for your goals, and it will give you the heuristics to make those decisions. It will let your AI use scale safely and privately. It will help you build a corpus of intelligence bottoms-up, by enabling the talent you have. It will give you dominion over your institutional knowledge.

One principle has stayed constant since the first Hermes release: the people using an AI system should control it. Hermes Business extends that principle to companies.

We’re building for everyone to own their intelligence, and we’re doing it in the open.