Nous Research Raises $90M to Take Its Open-Source AI Assistant Into the Enterprise

Nous Research, the AI startup whose open-source Hermes assistant became a developer phenomenon this year, has raised $90 million at a $1.5 billion valuation as it pivots toward the corporate world.

The Series B was led by Robot Ventures, with Nvidia, Microsoft's M12 and Samsung taking part, alongside Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures and others — including 1789 Capital, the venture firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. The round brings Nous's total funding to roughly $158 million.

The story so far reads like an open-source success tale. Hermes has been downloaded about 22.7 million times since February, and according to OpenRouter it overtook OpenClaw — the other viral open-source AI assistant of the year — in usage.

Now Nous wants to take that momentum into enterprises, betting that businesses will prefer open-source architecture that gives them control over their data over depending on a single proprietary vendor.

The leap from developer darling to corporate tool is where most open-source projects stumble. Nous is leaning on the numbers: the virality of Hermes is the pitch. Microsoft's M12 noticed the same signals everyone else did.

"They caught our attention as we were watching the OpenRouter charts," said M12 managing partner Peter Lenke. "That was helpful to see the viral adoption... It's a great indication of its value and utility."

CEO Dillon Rolnick frames the enterprise bet as a question of ownership. Businesses, he argues, should have a level of ownership over their own destinies — and an AI assistant they can inspect, download, modify and run inside their own walls is the shortest path there.

The enterprise case rests on an old complaint: AI assistants are useful but come with cost and security trade-offs that make compliance teams nervous. Nous argues open source answers both.

A model's code can be audited; data doesn't have to leave the building; and there's no single vendor to be locked into. It is the same logic that once sold companies on Linux — now applied to agents that do work on the internet on their behalf.

That pitch has a heavyweight lineup behind it. With Nvidia, Microsoft and Samsung all joining the round, Nous has the backing of the three companies that control most of the world's AI hardware and cloud leverage. Their presence suggests open models are no longer a hobbyist lane — they are infrastructure.

The competition  is fierce. Meta is pushing its Muse assistant and startups like Instinct are bringing cclosed-source alternatives to market. OpenClaw, the viral phenomenon Hermes overtook, stil casts a long shadow among tech enthusiasts.

But Nous has something most rivals don't: developers already picked it once. The $90 million bet is that corporations will make the same choice — and that in the AI assistant wars, openness turns out to be the feature that sells best.

By Hamza Faisal