Hugging Face, a Brooklyn, New York-based AI startup, raised $235 million at a valuation of $4.5 billion in Series D funding.
The round involved significant participation from industry giants including Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, Salesforce, and Sound Ventures.
With this latest investment, Hugging Face plans to “double down” on its supportive efforts in many domains, including research, enterprise, and startups. It has 170 employees, but plans on recruiting new talent over the coming months.
Hugging Face offers several data science hosting and development tools, including a GitHub-like hub for AI code repositories, models, and datasets, as well as web apps to demo AI-powered applications.
It also provides libraries for tasks like dataset processing and evaluating models in addition to an enterprise version of the hub that supports software-as-a-service and on-premises deployments.
“AI is the new way of building all software. It’s the most important paradigm shift of the decade and, compared to the software shift, it’s going to be bigger because of new capabilities and faster because software paved the way,” co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue told TechCrunch via email. “Hugging Face intends to be the open platform that empowers this paradigm shift.”
Currently, Hugging Face claims 10,000 customers and hosts over 1 million repositories on its model hub, with more than 50,000 organizations engaged on the platform.
Company: Hugging Face, Inc.
Raised: $235.0M
Round: Series D
Funding Month: August 2023
Lead Investors: Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, Salesforce, and Sound Ventures
Additional Investors:
Company Website: https://huggingface.co/
Software Category: Natural Language Processing (NLP) Software
About the Company: Founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face is an open-source platform provider of machine learning technologies. It allows users to build, train, and deploy art models using the reference open source in machine learning. Headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, the company is on a mission to democratize good machine learning, one commit at a time.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/24/hugging-face-raises-235m-from-investors-including-salesforce-and-nvidia/