Hugging Face
Overview
Per Wikipedia (secondary), founded in 2016 in New York by Clement Delangue (CEO), Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, starting as a chatbot app before moving to ML infrastructure. The Hub hosts models, datasets and Spaces; the company maintains the Transformers library.
Products
- Hugging Face Hub (models, datasets, Spaces); Transformers library; SmolLM and SmolVLM small models.
- Courses: Agents course, MCP course
Funding and ownership timeline
- 2023-08: reportedly a USD 235M round at USD 4.5B valuation (Wikipedia; investors not verified).
- 2025: reportedly declined a USD 500M Nvidia investment at a USD 7B valuation (per Wikipedia).
- 2026-09-03: Nvidia reportedly announced an agreement to acquire Hugging Face for about USD 12.9B (TechCrunch headline; the page was not opened). Cash/retention split, expected close and brand/openness commitments are not verified and are omitted.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugging_Face (secondary; fetched 2026-10-05)
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/03/nvidia-confirms-it-will-buy-hugging-face-for-12-9-billion/ (page not opened)
Open items
- Deal terms not confirmed against a primary press release; regulatory approval status unknown.