Nous Research raises $90 million at a $1.5 billion valuation
Nous Research has raised $90 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, I know a lot of people from the team, and they are a really great group. Teknium helped me when I was starting out here. Hermes has been a huge success for them.
Context
One of the best known open model labs now has much more money to compete with larger players.
Nous Research is known for its Hermes family of open models. Andrew Curran reported the round on Wednesday.
Deep dive
Nous Research announced a $90 million Series B on October 7 at a $1.5 billion valuation, which the company confirmed to TechCrunch. SiliconANGLE reported that Robot Ventures led the round. Nous lists NVIDIA, Microsoft's M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Menlo Ventures among its investors.
Nous began in 2023 by fine-tuning open models and is best known for its Hermes models and for Hermes Agent, an open source agent released under the MIT license in February. Nous says Hermes has been cloned more than 24 million times and, by its own estimate, accounts for about 2.5% of global token usage.
The company sells paid editions for consumers and organizations. SiliconANGLE, citing the Wall Street Journal, reported $36 million in annualized revenue as of mid-September.
What to expect next
Nous says it will use the money to build Hermes for Businesses, which lets companies choose models by price and keep control of their data and institutional knowledge.
According to the Wall Street Journal, as cited by SiliconANGLE, Nous expects annualized revenue to pass $100 million by the end of the year.