Hugging Face company profile: valuation, funding & revenue

This Hugging Face company profile covers the company's valuation, revenue, funding rounds, investors and history. Hugging Face works in artificial intelligence, with a focus on open-source AI platform and model hub. It was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in New York, New York, United States. Its latest valuation on record is US$4.5 billion (August 2023). Every figure links to a public source, and anything the company hasn't disclosed is marked as such.

Revenue

Funding history

Hugging Face timeline

Key dates from the sources on this page, oldest first. Metric snapshots are listed after the funding events.

• 2016 — Hugging Face is founded in New York by Clément Delangue (CEO), Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf.
• Aug 2023 — Series D: US$235M, valuing the company at US$4.5B. Investors: Salesforce Ventures (lead); Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM.
• August 2026 — Reported sale talks: Reported to be exploring a sale that could value it at US$13 billion or more; early stage, no deal announced.

Investors

Overview

Hugging Face runs the world's largest platform for sharing open AI models, datasets and demos. Its Hub hosts millions of models, from small text classifiers to frontier-scale open-weight language models released by Meta, Mistral, DeepSeek, Alibaba, Google and many others, along with hundreds of thousands of datasets and interactive apps called Spaces. Its open-source libraries, especially Transformers, have become standard tools for AI researchers and engineers. Often described as the "GitHub of machine learning", Hugging Face sits at the centre of the open-source AI ecosystem.

Clément Delangue, the CEO, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, all French entrepreneurs and engineers, founded Hugging Face in 2016 in New York. The company began as a chatbot app for teenagers, named after the hugging face emoji, before pivoting in 2018 when it open-sourced the natural language processing tools it had built, which quickly became popular with researchers. It now has major teams in New York and Paris and employees around the world.

Products

• The Hub: free hosting for models, datasets and Spaces, with version control, documentation and community discussion.
• Open-source libraries: Transformers, Diffusers, Datasets, PEFT, TRL and others that make it easier to train, fine-tune and run models.
• Inference and deployment: paid inference endpoints and providers that let companies run models without managing infrastructure.
• Enterprise Hub: private, secure model and data hosting with access controls for companies.
• Open models and research: its own research releases, such as the SmolLM family of small models and open datasets.
• Robotics: the LeRobot open-source project, low-cost robot arms and the 2025 acquisition of French robotics company Pollen Robotics, extending its open approach to physical AI.

Business model

Most of what Hugging Face offers is free. It earns money from paid subscriptions for individuals and teams, enterprise contracts for private hosting and security features, compute services for training and inference, and partnerships with cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure that integrate its platform. The company has said it has been profitable at times, but it doesn't publish detailed financials, so we show revenue as not disclosed. Its strategic value comes from being the default place where the AI community shares open work.

Funding

Hugging Face raised early funding from investors including Lux Capital, Addition, Sequoia Capital and Coatue. In August 2023 it raised a US$235 million Series D at a US$4.5 billion valuation, led by Salesforce Ventures, with strategic participation from Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and IBM. The broad roster of big tech backers reflected its neutral position: nearly every major AI company relies on its platform to distribute models. It hasn't raised new primary capital since.

Reported sale talks

In August 2026, Business Insider reported that Hugging Face was exploring a sale that could value it at US$13 billion or more, and had hired a bank to sound out potential buyers. The talks were described as early, with no bidder named and no deal reached. We list the report separately and keep US$4.5 billion as the latest confirmed valuation. A sale would be one of the largest acquisitions of an AI platform company, and would raise questions about how a new owner would treat the open community the company serves.

Competition

Hugging Face has no direct equivalent at its scale, but it competes in parts of its business with GitHub (owned by Microsoft) for code and model hosting, with cloud providers' model catalogues such as Amazon Bedrock and Google's Vertex AI Model Garden, with inference platforms like Together AI and Replicate, and with experiment tracking tools such as Weights & Biases. Its advantages are its community, network effects and neutrality.

Hugging Face at a glance

Hugging Face is a New York-based open-source AI platform founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. It hosts millions of models and datasets and maintains widely used libraries such as Transformers. It raised a US$235 million Series D at US$4.5 billion in August 2023, led by Salesforce Ventures, and was reported in 2026 to be exploring a sale at US$13 billion or more.

Timeline

• 2016: founded in New York as a chatbot app.
• 2018: open-sources its NLP tools; the Transformers library takes off.
• 2022: raises a Series C at about US$2 billion and supports the BLOOM open model project.
• August 2023: raises US$235 million at US$4.5 billion.
• 2025: acquires Pollen Robotics and expands open-source robotics.
• August 2026: reported to be exploring a sale.

Why the open-source AI ecosystem matters

Open models let anyone study, modify and deploy AI without paying for a closed API. Researchers use them to understand how models work; startups build products on them; companies run them privately for security; and governments use them to develop sovereign capabilities. The ecosystem depends on infrastructure for sharing and collaboration, and Hugging Face provides much of it. Its popularity means new open releases from major labs routinely appear on the Hub first, and download counts there have become a common measure of a model's adoption.

Network effects

Hugging Face benefits from strong network effects. Model developers publish there because that's where users are; users visit because that's where the models are. Tools, tutorials and community discussions reinforce this, making it hard for a competitor to replicate. This dynamic is a key reason potential acquirers might value the company far above its last funding round, and a key reason the community would be sensitive to any change in ownership or policy.

Questions for companies using open models

• What licence terms apply to the models you download?
• How do you verify the safety and provenance of models and datasets?
• Should you use private enterprise hosting for sensitive work?
• How will you deploy and monitor models in production?

Latest developments (October 2026)

Business Insider reported in August 2026 that Hugging Face was exploring a sale that could value it at US$13 billion or more and had retained a bank to gauge interest, though no buyer had been identified, according to Bloomberg Government. Its last primary round remains the 2023 Series D at US$4.5 billion, and secondary-market estimates in 2026 were below that level.

What to watch

Watch for developments in the reported sale process, new funding, growth of its enterprise and inference business, robotics progress and its role in open model releases.

Takeaways

Developers and companies can find, test and deploy open models in one place. Founders can learn from Hugging Face's community-first pivot. Investors should note that the reported sale value far exceeds its last priced round.

Sources

Every figure on this page comes from the public sources below. Where sources disagreed, we used the company's own announcement or a primary news report. Private-company data changes; check the date beside each figure.

1. Bloomberg Government (citing Business Insider)
2. Betanews