Nous Research raises $90M and opens Hermes to small B2B…

Hermes for Businesses pairs MIT-licensed agents with shared credits, per-member caps and a team skill library — a self-hostable alternative for 5–30-person sales teams.

Nous Research closed a $90 million Series B on October 7 at a $1.5 billion valuation, bringing total funding to roughly $158 million and, more significantly for small B2B teams, formalizing the commercial pitch for its Hermes Agent. Robot Ventures led the round. Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung, and 1789 Capital participated.

The capital is the headline. The product packaging is the story.

In mid-September, Nous quietly rolled out Hermes for Businesses in two tiers. Hermes Business gives a Nous Portal account one shared credit balance with per-member spending caps, plus a shared library where employee-written skills accumulate into internal tooling, according to Startup Fortune. Hermes Enterprise adds self-hosting on private infrastructure, SSO, and compliance controls. Hosted tiers run $20 to $200 a month. The target buyer is a 5–30-person sales team.

That configuration lands directly across from the closed-model wave. Apollo, Gong and ZoomInfo all shipped AI sales agents in a 48-hour window last week, and SalesCloser’s Sky collapsed setup to four minutes. Each of those is a managed, vendor-hosted agent. Nous is selling the inverse: an MIT-licensed agent you can point at any model and, at the Enterprise tier, run on your own hardware.

CEO Dillon Rolnick framed the pitch in two phrases. The agent will “cut your spend by letting you choose the best models at the best prices,” and buyers get “dominion over your institutional knowledge.” The first line is a bet on model-price compression. The second is a bet that privacy-sensitive buyers, especially those routing prospect data through outreach workflows, won’t want it sitting inside a vendor’s logs.

The revenue signal is loud enough to take seriously. The Wall Street Journal reported that Nous was at roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September and expects to pass $100 million before year-end, according to TechCrunch. Its claim of 2.5% of global token usage is self-reported and unverified.

GA pricing hasn’t published. The open-weight pitch at this price point hasn’t been matched. For now, the small-team buyer has a genuine second option.

Nous Research raises $90M and opens Hermes to small B2B teams

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