Nous Research, an Austin, Texas-based developer of open-source AI models and decentralized AI infrastructure, has raised $90 million in a Series B funding round at a valuation of $1.5 billion.

The round was led by Robot Ventures, with participation from NVIDIA, Union Square Ventures, M12, Samsung, Menlo Ventures and 1789 Capital. The latest funding brings Nous Research’s total funding to $158 million.

Nous Research develops open-source AI models and autonomous AI agents designed to handle complex tasks while allowing businesses to keep their data within secure environments. Its technology includes AI model fine-tuning, synthetic data generation and long-context reasoning.

The company is best known for its Hermes model family and Hermes Agent, an open-source AI agent that has gained traction among developers and individual users. Nous Research estimates that Hermes Agent has been cloned more than 24 million times and accounts for around 2.5% of global AI token usage.

The new funding will support the company’s expansion into the enterprise AI market through Hermes for Businesses. The platform is designed to allow companies to deploy customized AI agents that can handle multi-step workflows while keeping sensitive business data private.

Nous Research also plans to use the funding to acquire large-scale GPU clusters, expand its distributed machine learning research teams across Texas and remote locations worldwide, and improve its enterprise AI products.

The company is also seeing strong commercial growth. According to the information provided, Nous Research reached approximately $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026 and expects revenue to exceed $100 million before the end of the year.

Founded by Earan Barrett, Teknium and Jeffrey Quesnelle, Nous Research is focused on building open-source AI infrastructure and agentic systems that can help businesses automate complex workflows without relying entirely on centralized AI providers.