Hugging Face
Private
Featured
AI Community Platform
Founded 2016New York, NY~500 employees
- Valuation
- $4.5B(Aug 2023, last confirmed round)
- Total Funding
- $3.2B
- Revenue
- $130M in 2024;growing
- Profit Status
- Pre-profit
- Employees
- ~500
About Hugging Face
Hugging Face is the leading open-source AI platform, hosting 500,000+ models and 100,000+ datasets. The Transformers library powers much of the modern NLP ecosystem.
Company History
Founded 2016 as chatbot. Pivoted to open-source ML 2018. Transformers library 2019. Hub launched. $235M Series D at $4.5B Aug 2023. ~$2B raise Sep 2025 at $13.5B. Acquired Pollen Robotics (Apr 2025, open-source humanoid robots). Acquired GGML.ai (Feb 2026, bringing llama.cpp under HF umbrella). 2M+ models, 500K datasets, 13M+ users. Controls full open-source AI stack end-to-end. On 2 September 2026 NVIDIA signed a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face; closing is expected in the first half of 2027.
Company Timeline
8 milestones- 2016Founded as consumer chatbot
- 2018Transformers library released - immediately dominant
- 2019Model Hub launched
- Aug 2023$235M Series D at $4.5B
- Apr 2025Acquired Pollen Robotics (open-source humanoid 'Reachy')
- Sep 2025~$2B raise at $13.5B valuation; 2M+ models milestone
- Feb 2026Acquired GGML.ai (llama.cpp) - full open-source AI stack ownership; Reachy Mini app store (200+ apps) launched May 2026
- Sep 2026NVIDIA signed a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face (about $11.9B plus up to ~$1.0B retention programme, per NVIDIA's SEC filing); closing expected H1 2027, so Hugging Face remains independent until it closes
Funding Rounds
3 rounds| Date | Round | Amount | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 2022 | Series C | $100M | Sequoia, Coatue, NVIDIA |
| Aug 2023 | Series D | $235M | Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, Salesforce |
| Sep 2025 | Series E | ~$2B | Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, $13.5B valuation |
Products & Services
6- Transformers Library
- Hub
- Spaces
- Inference API
- Datasets
- PEFT
People & ecosystem
Key People
- Clement Delangue (CEO)
- Julien Chaumond (CTO)
- Thomas Wolf (CSO)
Key Investors
- Amazon
- NVIDIA
- IBM
- Salesforce
- Qualcomm