Hugging Face

About Hugging Face

Financials

Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.

Products by Hugging Face

All products by Hugging Face reviewed by our AI panel of experts.

Hugging FaceLLM Platforms

The GitHub of machine learning models, datasets, and AI apps

From $9/mo8.9/10

How Our Review Panel Scores Hugging Face

Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Hugging Face's product on their own terms. They landed within 0.7 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.

Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.

Competitive Landscape

Who Hugging Face competes with, and how they differ.

Replicate8.0/10

Focuses on hosting and running model inference via API with per-second billing, rather than being a community model hub; smaller open-source ecosystem than Hugging Face.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Together AI8.0/10

Runs open-source models at scale via a managed inference API and fine-tuning platform, competing for developers who would otherwise self-host Hugging Face models.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Fireworks AI8.0/10

Provides optimized, low-latency hosted inference for open-source models with proprietary serving infrastructure, targeting production deployment rather than model discovery/hosting.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

OpenRouter8.1/10

Acts as a routing layer/marketplace across many hosted LLM providers with usage-based pricing, rather than hosting models or code itself.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Ollama8.3/10

Targets local, on-device model running with a simple CLI/desktop tool, competing with Hugging Face's local inference libraries but without a hosted hub or enterprise API business.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Modal8.2/10

Provides serverless GPU compute for running and fine-tuning ML models, competing with Hugging Face's Inference Endpoints and Spaces for compute infrastructure rather than model hosting/community.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Company Timeline

Key milestones in Hugging Face's history, with sources.

1. Apr 14, 2025Acquisition

   Acquired Pollen Robotics, entering open-source robotics

   Bought the French maker of the Reachy 2 humanoid robot (terms undisclosed) to commercialize it under an open-source model, extending Hugging Face into robotics hardware.

   techcrunch.com
2. Aug 24, 2023Funding

   Series D — $235M at a $4.5B valuation

   Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, Salesforce and Sound Ventures invested, doubling the May 2022 valuation and bringing total raised to $395.2M.

   techcrunch.com
3. Feb 21, 2023Partnership

   Expanded long-term strategic partnership with AWS

   AWS became Hugging Face's preferred cloud provider, with models fine-tuned and deployed via SageMaker, Trainium and Inferentia. The Hub then hosted 100,000+ free models downloaded over a million times daily.

   huggingface.co
4. Jul 12, 2022Launch

   Released BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open multilingual LLM

   The BigScience collaboration of 1,000+ researchers from 70+ countries, coordinated by Hugging Face, released BLOOM — an open large language model generating text in 46 natural languages and 13 programming languages.

   huggingface.co
5. May 9, 2022Funding

   Series C — $100M led by Lux Capital

   Sequoia and Coatue participated, with press reporting a $2B valuation. The Hub hosted 100,000 pre-trained models and 10,000 datasets, used by more than 10,000 companies.

   huggingface.co
6. Dec 21, 2021Acquisition

   Acquired Gradio

   Acquired the open-source library for building interactive ML model demos — 300,000+ demos built at the time. Founder Abubakar Abid and his team joined Hugging Face.

   huggingface.co
7. Mar 11, 2021Funding

   Series B — $40M led by Addition

   Lux Capital, a_capital and Betaworks participated. The company was cash-flow positive in early 2021, served ~5,000 companies, and Transformers had 42,000 GitHub stars.

   techcrunch.com
8. Dec 17, 2019Funding

   Raised $15M led by Lux Capital

   Funding to build out the open-source Transformers NLP library, by then downloaded over a million times and used in production by Microsoft Bing and Monzo.

   techcrunch.com
9. May 23, 2018Funding

   Seed round — $4M led by a_capital

   Ronny Conway's a_capital led a $4M seed with Betaworks, SV Angel and Kevin Durant participating; the chatbot was handling 1M messages a day.

   techcrunch.com
10. 2018Launch

    Open-sourced a PyTorch BERT implementation — the start of Transformers

    Within a week of Google releasing BERT in late 2018, Hugging Face shipped an open-source PyTorch implementation — the seed of the Transformers library and of the pivot to open-source ML infrastructure formalized in 2019.

    research.contrary.com
11. Mar 9, 2017Launch

    Launched the Hugging Face chatbot app on iOS

    The New York startup debuted its "artificial BFF" chatbot app for entertainment, having raised $1.2M from Betaworks, SV Angel and NBA star Kevin Durant.

    techcrunch.com
12. 2016Founded

    Founded in New York as a teen-focused chatbot startup

    Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf founded Hugging Face in 2016, initially building a consumer chatbot app aimed at teenagers.

    en.wikipedia.org