Industry27d ago
Nous Research raises $90M Series B at $1.5B to take MIT-licensed Hermes Agent into businesses
On Oct 7 Nous Research, maker of the open-source Hermes Agent, confirmed a $90M Series B at a $1.5B valuation led by Robot Ventures, with NVIDIA, Microsoft's M12, Samsung, USV, Y Combinator and Menlo among backers, bringing total funding to $158M. Nous says Hermes Agent has been cloned over 24M times and drives about 2.5% of global token usage (internal estimate). The money funds Hermes for Businesses: a team tier with shared balance and skill library, and an Enterprise edition on customer-controlled infrastructure with SSO and SLAs, plus a mobile app.
Release21d ago
Hermes Agent v0.22.0: keyless guided onboarding, one-click local llama.cpp models, Gmail/Linear/Notion connectors and a 600-plugin catalog
Nous Research shipped Hermes Agent v0.22.0, "The Threshold Release", on Oct 14 (UTC). Fresh desktop installs open a guided setup chat on a free trial model (nous/welcome) with no API key, connectors reach Gmail, Linear and Notion through the Nous tool gateway, a one-click llama.cpp runtime runs local models, installs now follow tested SemVer stable releases, and desktop builds are signed (including the Microsoft Store). The source tree shrank from about 1.06M to 698K lines (−34%).
Benchmark13d ago
FrontierRefactor Introduces First Code Performance Benchmark: 41% of Agent Patches Pass Tests with Zero Gain or Regressions
Published in arXiv:2610.25834, FrontierRefactor establishes the industry's first evaluation benchmark targeting autonomous coding agents on multi-scale, performance-oriented codebase refactoring. Unlike traditional benchmarks like SWE-bench that measure only functional pass rates, FrontierRefactor spans seven programming languages and 60 Amdahl-qualified tasks ranging from kernels to full repositories (10^1 to 10^4+ LOC). Initial evaluations reveal that over 41% of agent patches pass functional equivalence suites yet yield zero verified speedup—with 19.3% triggering severe runtime performance regressions, highlighting the vital need for multi-turn profiling feedback.
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