Hermes for Businesses: what it is and is Hermes Agent free?

Hermes for Businesses is the company edition of Hermes Agent, the open-source AI agent from Nous Research. It's meant to let a business run its own agents, pick models by price, keep its data private, and hold on to what the agent learns. The regular Hermes Agent is free under the MIT license. Hermes for Businesses has no published price or launch date yet.

The news came on Wednesday, October 7. @NousResearch posted that it had raised a Series B "to bring Hermes Agent to new frontiers (and, yes, build a mobile app)," and thanked Nvidia, Microsoft's M12, Samsung Next and Robot Ventures, among others. That post quotes one from CEO @dillonrolnick, who linked his longer note on the raise with a dry "we did alright for a couple of goofballs."

What Nous says Hermes for Businesses will do

Rolnick's note on the fundraise confirms a $90 million round. It describes Hermes for Businesses as something the company will now build and ship, so it isn't a finished product you can buy today. The stated goals:

• Let a company own and improve its own AI setup instead of renting one vendor's
• Cut spending by choosing models on performance and price
• Scale AI use safely and privately
• Build up internal knowledge from the bottom up and keep control of it

TechCrunch's coverage puts it more concretely: companies deploy customized agents that handle multi-step workflows while their data stays private. The Wall Street Journal reported a $1.5 billion valuation. Nous hasn't confirmed that number itself.

What Hermes Agent already is

The business version only makes sense once you know the free one. Hermes Agent came out in February. It remembers your projects, writes reusable "skills" as it works, and carries what it learned from one session into the next. You choose where it runs (Mac, Windows, Linux or a cloud server) and which model drives it. According to The Next Web, you can also talk to it through Telegram, Slack and WhatsApp.

Nous says the agent has been cloned more than 24 million times, and by its own internal estimate Hermes drives about 2.5% of global AI token usage. Both numbers come from the company and nobody outside it has checked them. The Journal's own count was more than 22 million downloads since February, which is in the same range.

Is Hermes Agent free?

The software is. The MIT license means you can download it, run it and change it at no charge. You still pay for the model that powers it and for wherever it runs.

Hostinger's cost breakdown lists Nous's own Portal plans at $0 (pay as you go), $20, $100 and $200 a month, with the paid tiers including model credits. It estimates $4 to $25 a month for a self-hosted server plus roughly $2 to $60 a month in API usage for a typical setup. If you run a local model on your own hardware, those API costs go away.

Hermes for Businesses will presumably add a paid layer on top for admin controls, privacy guarantees and shared company knowledge. Nous hasn't said what that layer costs.

My read

I like the pitch. Most enterprise AI products want you to standardize on one vendor's models. Nous is betting that companies would rather swap models as prices fall and keep whatever their agents learn along the way. Rolnick's note says "tomorrow's moats will be built around execution, trust, and extensibility," and anyone who has watched a SaaS bill double will get why that lands.

Still, right now this is a funding announcement and a list of goals. There's no price sheet. And open-source agents need someone to set them up, pick the model, decide what the agent may touch and keep an eye on it afterward. The license costs nothing, but running one well is real work.

What this means for a small business

Agents are splitting into two camps: closed assistants that live inside one vendor's apps, and open agents you can point at whichever model is cheapest this month. For a 10-person shop, picking a camp comes later. First figure out which repetitive work you'd actually hand to an agent and what it should never be allowed to touch.

If you aren't sure where an agent would save your team hours, New Face Design runs a free process audit that maps where the time goes and which steps are worth automating first.