SAN FRANCISCO – Nous Research, the startup behind the viral open-source AI agent Hermes, said Wednesday it has raised $90 million from backers including Nvidia, Microsoft's M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Menlo Ventures.

The company plans to use the capital to build an "alternative" to giant centralized AI projects – one that is more open, competitive and "safer because of its auditability and not because of its gate-keepers," CEO Dillon Rolnick wrote in a blog post announcing the round.

DeAI News was on-site at a panel discussion Wednesday in San Francisco, part of SF Tech Week, where Sam Herring, Nous' machine-learning engineering lead, said he wants Hermes to set the industry standard as an open-source alternative to closed, proprietary AI platforms. (Rivals include closed offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic.)

"We have kind of been trying to encourage labs to use Hermes as the harness of their choice," Herring said during the panel.

The raise is a milestone for decentralized AI, the corner of the industry betting that powerful AI shouldn't stay locked inside a handful of big companies.

The presence of big tech names among Nous' investors shows that the push toward open-source frameworks has deep-pocketed backing.

Going viral

Nous, which started out as a group of volunteers fine-tuning open-source AI models and later built a network for training them on spare computer chips scattered around the internet, found breakout success earlier this year when it released Hermes Agent under a permissive open-source license, instantly becoming a rival to the trendsetter OpenClaw agent harness.

Rolnick wrote that Hermes Agent has since been cloned more than 24 million times. By the company's own estimate, it drives about 2.5% of all AI usage worldwide.

That growth surprised even the people who built it, Herring said. The team had first developed Hermes for its own use.

"We never thought we would get here," he said. "We made Hermes as a productivity tool. So the fact that it's taken off like this, we've just been trying to run with the ball."

The new money will also fund Hermes for Businesses, which Rolnick said will let companies pick their own AI models and keep control of their own institutional knowledge.

DeAI roots

Nous' decentralized roots run deeper than its agent business. The team began in 2022 as volunteers who met on Discord, GitHub and Twitter. Co-founder Karan Malhotra has called the founders "crypto native," according to Fortune. In April 2025, crypto venture firm Paradigm led a $50 million Series A that valued Nous' yet-to-launch token at $1 billion, The Block reported.

Part of that money was earmarked for Psyche, that chip-sharing network. Nous says Psyche relies on its own technique for sharply cutting the data those chips must swap, and coordinates the work on the Solana blockchain. Wednesday's fundraising note doesn't mention Psyche, Solana or a token.

"We formed Nous in 2023 to combat the seemingly inexorable trend dragging AI toward centralization and walled gardens," Rolnick wrote.

Herring's panel, on the open-source AI stack, was hosted by AI cloud provider Novita AI as part of SF Tech Week and moderated by Novita's Johnny Chin. Herring shared the stage with Mao Cheng of AI infrastructure startup RadixArk, Walter Korman of Vercel, and Akshay of benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis.

Akshay estimated that open models trail proprietary ones by roughly three to nine months. Herring predicted that gap would shrink.

HOW AI WAS USED IN THE PRODUCTION OF THIS PIECE: We used Claude in combination with custom skills and a transcript of the panel discussion to write the first draft. We then filed the draft to DeAI News on DistroVerse, our web app, using the Distro Publisher connector. We edited the piece on DistroVerse's built-in editor. We used the Distro Publisher image-uploader to add the featured image taken by January Jones at the event in San Francisco.