Nous Research names Microsoft’s M12 among backers of its $90M round

Nous Research published its own note on the $90 million it just raised, and that note names a backer neither TechCrunch nor SiliconANGLE listed: Microsoft’s M12. The same note never states the $1.5 billion valuation that both outlets reported and TechCrunch put in its headline.

The company builds Hermes Agent, an open source agent that runs on a user’s own machine. Its note on the fundraise says Nous “brought together some of the strongest investors in technology” and lists seven of them: NVIDIA, Microsoft’s M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Menlo Ventures, “among others”. Nous attributes M12 to Microsoft, and neither write-up names the firm at all.

What the note leaves out matters just as much, because it is thinner than the coverage built on it. The words valuation, billion and Series B don’t appear in it anywhere, and it names no lead investor. TechCrunch reported a $90 million Series B at $1.5 billion led by Robot Ventures, bringing the three-year-old startup’s total funding to $158 million. TechCrunch also listed 1789 Capital, where it said Donald Trump Jr. is a partner, and Nous doesn’t mention that firm.

Somehow, $90 million is modest in modern fundraising. We at Nous have always delivered more with less, and we are proud of our resourcefulness in an age of waste.

Nous Research, A note on our fundraise

The adoption number shifted in transit too, and that matters because it is the one metric Nous leads with. Nous wrote that Hermes “has been cloned over 24 million times” and drives “approximately 2.5% of all global token usage”, which it flagged as a best internal estimate. SiliconANGLE turned the first figure into downloads, which isn’t the same thing. The public repository shows 251,992 stars and 54,352 forks under an MIT license, so nothing on the page a reader can open supports or contradicts the 24 million.

The pricing ladder nobody reported

SiliconANGLE described three paid editions: Hermes Cloud, Hermes Business and Hermes Enterprise. The Hermes Agent site puts numbers on the consumer end of that, listing four subscription tiers, and the same four sit in the Stripe payload on the Hermes Cloud page. The ladder tops out at $200 a month. Neither write-up carried a price at all.

Tier	Per month	Monthly credits	Rollover cap
Free	$0	$0, free models only	none
Plus	$20	$22.00	$10.00
Super	$100	$110.00	$50.00
Ultra	$200	$220.00	$100.00

Each paid tier adds a 10% credit bonus over its price, and by our arithmetic the rollover cap lands at exactly half the price in every case. All three carry what the site calls access to 200+ models and hosted tool usage. Hermes Business, though, is the product this money is meant to fund, and it carries no price at all. Its portal page offers an enterprise email address and says Hermes Enterprise runs “on infrastructure you control” with tailored deployment, SSO and SLAs.

Both outlets put Nous at roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026, passing $100 million before the end of the year, and both credit the Wall Street Journal for it. Nous gives no revenue figure of its own, so that number still rests on reporting nobody else can check. Reading the company’s page rather than the coverage has paid off here before, as it did on Snorkel AI’s $350M Series E.

Whether Microsoft confirms M12’s participation is the thing to watch. Nvidia’s stakes in listed companies surface in a quarterly 13F filing, which is how we tracked its $99B equity portfolio, but a private round like this one isn’t reported there. Until Microsoft says something, Nous’s own note is the only record that M12 took part.