Nvidia, Samsung Back $90M Round for AI Agent Startup Nous Research

The company released Hermes in February under an open-source license. Nous said the agent has been downloaded more than 24 million times and has several thousand open-source contributors. It accounts for an estimated 2.5% of global token consumption, a metric tied to AI models' hardware use, according to the company.

Hermes ships as a desktop app that can interact with a user's files. A consumer can ask it to organize documents by category, for example. The agent can also access programs on the user's machine, use a browser to find web data, run code in a Docker container and perform related tasks.

Under the hood, Hermes uses popular large language models such as Claude to complete tasks and also supports a lineup of LLMs developed by Nous. Those are fine-tuned, or customized, versions of open-source LLMs. Nous' latest collection is called the Hermes 4 series. The company customized the models using a training dataset of 5 million synthetically generated records. About two thirds of the records were specifically created to enhance Hermes 4's reasoning capabilities, Nous said, and the company generated the data with a custom tool called DataForge.

A router enables Hermes to send each user prompt to the LLM best equipped to process it, taking into account inference costs, speed and output quality. Another built-in module personalizes LLM responses based on user preferences. Users can optionally enhance personalization by connecting Hermes to external databases such as the agent-optimized RetainDB relational store. According to Nous, adding an external database enables Hermes to retain preferences and project data across user sessions.

Nous monetizes the agent with three paid editions. Hermes Cloud lets consumers launch agents in a few seconds without setting up infrastructure. Hermes Business and Hermes Enterprise are aimed at organizations, enabling administrators to set team-level token use limits while end users can share agent customizations with colleagues.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Nous generated $36 million in annualized revenue as of mid-September. The company expects that number to top $100 million by the end of the year. Nous said it will use the funding to expand adoption of Hermes' business editions.