Hugging Face

Hugging Face is a French-American company based in New York City, dedicated to advancing and democratizing artificial intelligence through open source and open science. Founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face began as a chatbot app before evolving into a leading collaboration platform for the machine learning community.

The Hugging Face Hub enables users and organizations to collaborate on models, datasets, and applications, while offering seamless ML compute directly from the platform. Their mission is to build the future of AI in a collaborative and transparent way.

Key Milestones:

• March 2021: Raised $40M in Series B funding.
• April 2021: Launched the BigScience Research Workshop.
• 2022: Released BLOOM, a multilingual LLM with 176B parameters.
• December 2022: Acquired Gradio.
• May 2022: Closed Series C round at a $2B valuation.
• August 2022: Introduced the Private Hub.
• February 2023: Partnered with Amazon Web Services.
• August 2023: Raised $235M in Series D funding at a $4.5B valuation, with participation from Salesforce, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, IBM, and Qualcomm.
• June 2024: Launched an AI accelerator for European startups with Meta and Scaleway.
• September 2024: Partnered with Meta and UNESCO on a global online translator.
• April 2025: Acquired Pollen Robotics.

Core Technologies:

• Transformers: The open-source Python library that helped popularize modern LLMs.
• Hub: A Git-based repository system for models, datasets, and web apps.
• Supporting libraries: Datasets, Evaluate, Diffusers, Gradio.

Today, over 50,000 organizations—including Meta AI, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Grammarly, and Intel—use Hugging Face to build, share, and deploy ML models.

Hugging Face is building the future of machine learning—open, collaborative, and accessible to all.

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