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The autonomous business that can’t lose money. Hermes earns revenue, spends on the tools it needs, and runs real operations, and every dollar is gated by a human-in-the-loop Treasury with hard caps it physically cannot breach.

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What HermesCo is

HermesCo is a single autonomous operator that runs like a one-person company. It can stand up an offer, take real payments, do real work on its own machine, and pay for the tools it needs. The difference from a normal agent is that it physically cannot lose your money: every spend is screened by an always-on safety layer and bounded by hard caps that are enforced in code at execution time, not promised in a prompt. It is built around one pipeline that unifies three systems:

Hermes decides

Hermes 4 405B (Nous Research) is the operator brain. It reasons, plans, and drives every tool through Hermes’s native <tool_call> protocol.

Nemotron screens

NVIDIA Nemotron is the always-on NemoClaw safety screen. It reviews every spend before money can move.

Stripe settles

Stripe is the money rail. Real Checkout, real payment links, real PaymentIntents. No fabricated revenue, no test card shortcuts.

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The core guarantee

The Treasury holds only real capital: what you deposit plus what the agent actually earns through Stripe. Before any spend executes, it passes a deterministic gate: 
spend amount > per-action cap   -> refused in code (NemoClaw refuses)
spend amount >= auto-approve     -> held for a human decision
otherwise                        -> auto-approved, then caps re-checked
The caps (per-action, daily, minimum reserve) are not advisory. They are evaluated at execution time, so even a fully autonomous run cannot overspend. This is the “you can trust it with a credit card” property, and it is demonstrable without any Stripe key: ask the agent to spend over the cap and watch the Treasury refuse it.

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What makes it real

run_in_sandbox is not a server-side stub. Each agent is provisioned a dedicated, multi-core Fly Machine (Python 3.12, Node 22, git, bash) as its body. It does real work there, the machine is metered, and it suspends to $0 compute when idle. See Per-agent Fly machines.
Deposits run through real Stripe Checkout. Earning stands up a real product and payment link. Spending debits real capital under approval and caps. The same code path runs in Stripe test mode or live mode by swapping a single key. See Treasury.
If Stripe is not connected, the money tools fail honestly (“Stripe is not connected”) rather than fabricating a payment. There is no seeded balance, no simulated revenue, and no canned test card anywhere in the codebase.

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Where to go next

Quickstart

Run HermesCo locally and drive the agent in a few minutes.

Architecture

The full picture: brain, safety, money, body, and persistence.

The pipeline

How Hermes, Nemotron, and Stripe fit into one loop.

API Reference

Every HermesCo endpoint, with request and response shapes.
Engineering partner: Cognition AI and Devin. HermesCo was built as an entry for the Hermes Agent Accelerated Business Hackathon (NVIDIA, Stripe, Nous Research).