Hugging Face

Reviewed active Updated Mar 23, 2026

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Location New York, NY
Founded 2016
Latest Stage Series D
Total Raised $395M
Website https://huggingface.co
Sector
artificial-intelligence machine-learning open-source developer-tools

Investors

Sonya Huang Series C (2022)
Ron Conway Seed (2016)
Josh Wolfe 2019 (2019)
Olivier Pomel 2022 (2022)
Pat Grady Growth (2022)
Greg Brockman Series A (2019)
Lee Fixel Series C ($100M) (2022)
Geoff Ralston Seed (2017)
Brandon Reeves Series A ($15M) (2019)
David Helgason Seed (2018)
Lux Capital Series A (2019)
Lux Capital Series C (2022)
Addition Series B (2021)
Sequoia Capital Series C (2022)
Coatue Management Series C (2022)
SV Angel Angel (2017)
datadog 2022 (2022)
independent Series A (2019)
Y Combinator Seed (2017)
transition-vc Seed (2018)

Founders

Clément Delangue CEO & Co-Founder
Julien Chaumond CTO & Co-Founder
Thomas Wolf CSO & Co-Founder

About

Hugging Face is an open-source AI and machine learning platform founded in 2016 in New York City by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf 1. The company originally developed a chatbot app for teenagers before pivoting to build open-source NLP tools, releasing the Hugging Face Transformers library which became widely adopted by researchers and engineers 1. Today, the platform hosts over 100,000 pre-trained models and 10,000 datasets, serving as the primary hub for AI model sharing and collaboration 2. By 2024, the company reported $130.1M in revenue and 50,000 customers 3.

Funding History

Date Round Amount Lead Co-investors
March 2017 Angel $1.2M Betaworks SV Angel, Kevin Durant 4
May 2018 Seed $4M Ronny Conway — 4
December 2019 Series A $15M Lux Capital A.Capital, Betaworks, Richard Socher, Greg Brockman 56
March 2021 Series B $40M Addition Lux Capital, A.Capital, Betaworks 7
May 2022 Series C $100M Lux Capital Sequoia, Coatue, Addition, A.Capital, SV Angel, Betaworks, AIX Ventures, Kevin Durant, Olivier Pomel 2
August 2023 Series D $235M Salesforce Ventures Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, Sound Ventures 89

The Series D round valued Hugging Face at $4.5 billion, doubling its valuation from the Series C 89.

What Investors Say

“Hugging Face is one of the fastest-growing open-source projects we have ever seen.” — Lux Capital, on leading the Series A 6.

“We believe Hugging Face will become the de facto technology and API that every developer will use for understanding and generating natural language.” — Lux Capital 6.

“Very few people are actually extraordinary at creating communities. Delangue understands the user — he is the user.” — Sonya Huang, Partner at Sequoia 10.

“Open source will shape the future of artificial intelligence. Open source enables collaboration, transparency, accountability, innovation, and trust.” — Salesforce Ventures, on leading the Series D 11.

“We were deeply impressed by the speed of commercial growth (one of the fastest we have seen in recent history) and at the continuous amazing feedback we received through customer conversations.” — Salesforce Ventures 11.

What Founders Say

“AI is the new paradigm to build all technology. It’s not more; it’s not less.” — Clément Delangue, CEO 10.

“Our main goal is not so much to build a big company or to make money. I’m most excited about the potential for change.” — Clément Delangue, CEO 10.

Sources

  1. Wikipedia, “Hugging Face,” accessed March 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugging_Face↩↩

  2. Hugging Face Blog, “We Raised $100 Million for Open & Collaborative Machine Learning,” May 2022. https://huggingface.co/blog/series-c↩↩

  3. Latka, “How Hugging Face hit $130.1M revenue and 50K customers in 2024,” accessed March 2026. https://getlatka.com/companies/hugging-face↩

  4. Clay, “How Much Did Hugging Face Raise? Funding & Key Investors,” accessed March 2026. https://www.clay.com/dossier/hugging-face-funding↩↩

  5. TechCrunch, “Hugging Face raises $15 million to build the definitive natural language processing library,” December 17, 2019. https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/17/hugging-face-raises-15-million-to-build-the-definitive-natural-language-processing-library/↩

  6. Lux Capital, “Our Investment in Hugging Face,” accessed March 2026. https://www.luxcapital.com/news/our-investment-in-hugging-face↩↩↩

  7. TechCrunch, “Hugging Face raises $40 million for its natural language processing library,” March 11, 2021. https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/11/hugging-face-raises-40-million-for-its-natural-language-processing-library/↩

  8. TechCrunch, “Hugging Face raises $235M from investors, including Salesforce and Nvidia,” August 24, 2023. https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/24/hugging-face-raises-235m-from-investors-including-salesforce-and-nvidia/↩↩

  9. CNBC, “Google, Amazon, Nvidia and other tech giants invest in AI startup Hugging Face, sending its valuation to $4.5 billion,” August 24, 2023. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/24/google-amazon-nvidia-amd-other-tech-giants-invest-in-hugging-face.html↩↩

  10. Sequoia Capital, “Hugging Face’s Clem Delangue: Open-Sourcing the Future of AI,” accessed March 2026. https://sequoiacap.com/article/clem-delangue-spotlight/↩↩↩

  11. Salesforce Ventures, “Welcome, Hugging Face!” accessed March 2026. https://salesforceventures.com/perspectives/welcome-hugging-face/↩↩