Nous Research, which makes the open-source Hermes AI agent that has hit 22M+ downloads since February, raised $90M at a $1.2B valuation to expand to enterprises (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)

Nous Research’s $90 million funding round and $1.2 billion valuation signal accelerating enterprise demand for open-source AI agents, especially tools that can be adopted quickly at scale. For CIOs, this underscores a strategic shift toward evaluating open-source and vendor-neutral agent platforms as alternatives to proprietary copilots, with implications for cost, customization, governance, and integration into existing IT and data environments.