Nous Research raised $90 million to expand its development of open AI models and agents, with backing from NVIDIA, Microsoft’s M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, Menlo Ventures, and other investors.
Nous was founded in 2023 with a focus on developing open AI systems that give users greater control over the models and agents they use.
The company initially concentrated on post-training and fine-tuning open models.
Its work has included adapting Meta’s Llama models, developing synthetic data methods, advancing open-source tool calling, and demonstrating that smaller development teams can produce competitive fine-tuned models.
Nous also developed YaRN, a technique designed to expand context windows for open models at lower incremental cost.
The company later developed Hermes Agent, an open-source agent platform that learns across usage sessions, remembers projects, creates reusable skills, and allows users to choose where the agent runs and which models it uses.
Hermes Agent was released under an MIT license.
Nous said Hermes has now been cloned more than 24 million times.
Based on the company’s internal estimates, Hermes accounts for approximately 2.5% of global token usage.
Thousands of contributors have participated in its development.
Nous plans to use the latest financing to expand Hermes into the enterprise market through Hermes for Businesses.
The company intends for the enterprise platform to allow organizations to control their own AI infrastructure, select models based on cost and performance, retain institutional knowledge, and scale AI deployments privately.
