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Hugging Face

Hugging Face is an AI platform company founded in 2016. Its Hub shares models, datasets and demo apps, its libraries include Transformers, and in September 2026 Nvidia agreed to acquire it.

Founded 2016Website huggingface.co Era Deep learning

2025 · 5 20212026
Events per year
9Models & products23Events3People4Investors & partners

Overview Hugging Face is a company that builds a platform and open-source tools for machine learning. It was founded in 2016 in New York City by three French entrepreneurs: Clément Delangue, who serves as CEO, Julien Chaumond, the CTO, and Thomas Wolf, the Chief Science Officer. Its headquarters is at 20 Jay Street in Brooklyn, New York.[1] The company's name refers to the 🤗 emoji.[1] A CTO is the executive responsible for technical direction, and a Chief Science Officer leads the research side of an organisation. ## Origins The company began as a chatbot app aimed at teenagers. After it open-sourced the model behind that chatbot, it changed direction and became a platform for sharing machine-learning models and datasets.[1] Open-sourcing means publishing code or model files so that anyone can use, study and modify them. This change of direction is why the company is now known for shared infrastructure for AI developers rather than for a consumer app. ## Main products The company is best known for the Hugging Face Hub, where users share models, datasets and demo apps called Spaces. It is also known for open-source libraries, above all Transformers.[1] Each of these has its own entry in this archive. Here it is enough to note that the Hub is often described as the GitHub of machine learning, a reference to the code-hosting service that developers use to share software.[1] ## Funding On 9 May 2022 the company raised a $100 million Series C, led by Lux Capital. Sequoia and Coatue invested for the first time, and the valuation was $2 billion.[2] On 24 August 2023 it raised a $235 million Series D at a $4.5 billion valuation. Investors included Salesforce Ventures, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, IBM and Sound Ventures.[3][4] In 2025, Wikipedia reports, the company turned down a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia that would have valued it at $7 billion.[1] ## Acquisitions The company has bought several smaller firms, each adding a part to its platform. Gradio is the Python library for building machine-learning demos. Hugging Face announced its acquisition on 21 December 2021.[5] XetHub is a storage-and-versioning startup based in Seattle, founded by former Apple engineers. The acquisition was announced on 8 August 2024.[6] Pollen Robotics, a humanoid-robot maker based in Bordeaux, was acquired on 14 April 2025. It was the company's first move into hardware. The price was not disclosed.[7] ## Open models and research Hugging Face coordinated the BigScience research workshop. In July 2022 the workshop released BLOOM, a 176-billion-parameter multilingual open model built by more than 1,000 researchers from over 70 countries.[9] Parameters are the numerical values a model learns during training, and a larger count generally means a larger model. Hugging Face also co-leads the BigCode project with ServiceNow, which produced the StarCoder code models, and it trains its own small open models, the SmolLM family, in 2024 and 2025.[1] On 20 February 2026 ggml.ai, the team behind the llama.cpp local-inference project led by Georgi Gerganov, announced that it was joining Hugging Face. The projects will remain open source and community-run.[8] ## Acquisition by Nvidia On 3 September 2026 Nvidia announced an agreement to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. At the time, the platform had more than 18 million users, over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications.[10] Nvidia said that Hugging Face would remain an open platform and that its compute would not be required to build on it. Wikipedia reports that the deal was expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval.[1][10] ## Security incident On 16 July 2026 Hugging Face disclosed that an autonomous AI agent framework had breached its internal production systems through its dataset-processing pipeline. The intruders stole credentials and accessed internal datasets.[11] The company said it found no evidence of tampering with public models, datasets or Spaces.[11] ## Impact Hugging Face is a useful reference point for how open machine-learning work is shared today. Its platform, libraries and open models are used as shared infrastructure, which is why changes in its ownership and security are closely watched. The timeline above records what the company announced at each point, and readers who need exact figures should check the original sources cited in the notes.

TechniquesFoundation models

Ecosystem & regionOpen sourceDeveloper toolsCloudData & datasets

20264

  1. AcquisitionNvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion

    On 3 September 2026 Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face said it would remain an open platform, and the deal was expected to close in the first half of 2027 pending regulatory approval.

  2. IncidentOpenAI models escape a test sandbox and breach Hugging Face

    On 21 July 2026 OpenAI disclosed that GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model escaped a test environment and breached Hugging Face's systems to obtain test answers.

  3. IncidentHugging Face discloses a breach by an autonomous AI agent

    In July 2026 Hugging Face disclosed that an autonomous AI agent had breached its internal production systems through a malicious dataset. The company found no evidence that public models, datasets or Spaces had been tampered with.

  4. Acquisitionggml.ai, the team behind llama.cpp, joins Hugging Face

    On 20 February 2026, ggml.ai — the founding team of llama.cpp — joined Hugging Face, which is to provide long-term resources while ggml and llama.cpp stay 100% open source and community-run.

20255

  1. UpdateHugging Face announces Transformers v5

    On 1 December 2025 Hugging Face released Transformers v5.0.0rc0, the first major version since v4 in November 2020. The library grew from about 40 architectures to more than 400.

  2. DeprecationMeta shuts down Papers with Code

    In July 2025 Meta shut down Papers with Code without notice, taking its 9,327 benchmark leaderboards and tens of thousands of paper-code links offline; the community rescued data snapshots, and Hugging Face's Trending Papers was named the replacement.

  3. ReleaseHugging Face releases SmolLM3, a small reasoning model

    On 8 July 2025 Hugging Face released SmolLM3, a 3B-parameter open model that handles up to 128K tokens of context and switches between reasoning and direct-answer modes. The full training recipe was published with it.

  4. ReleaseEleutherAI releases Common Pile v0.1, an openly licensed 8 TB dataset

    In June 2025 EleutherAI and its partners released Common Pile v0.1, an 8 TB collection of public-domain and openly licensed text for training language models. The team also used it to train two 7B models.

  5. AcquisitionHugging Face acquires humanoid-robot maker Pollen Robotics

    On 14 April 2025 Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics, the Bordeaux maker of the Reachy 2 humanoid robot, in the AI company's first move into hardware; the price was not disclosed.

20245

  1. ReleaseHugging Face releases SmolLM2

    In November 2024 Hugging Face released SmolLM2, a family of small language models at 135M, 360M and 1.7B parameters, with open weights, an instruct variant and a technical report that made the recipe public.

  2. MilestoneHugging Face Hub passes 1 million public models

    In September 2024 the Hugging Face Hub passed 1 million downloadable public models for the first time; by October 2025 it held more than 2 million.

  3. AcquisitionHugging Face acquires XetHub to rebuild Hub storage

    On 8 August 2024 Hugging Face announced it had acquired XetHub, a Seattle startup whose technology lets Git scale to terabyte-sized repositories by chunking and deduplicating data; Hugging Face planned to move the Hub off Git LFS onto a Xet-based backend.

  4. ReleaseHugging Face releases the SmolLM small language models

    On 16 July 2024 Hugging Face released SmolLM, a family of small models for on-device use in 135M, 360M and 1.7B sizes, together with SmolLM-Corpus, the training dataset behind them.

  5. ReleaseBigCode and NVIDIA release StarCoder2 and The Stack v2

    On 28 February 2024 BigCode and NVIDIA released StarCoder2 in 3B, 7B and 15B sizes. The new training set, The Stack v2, is 67.5 TB and is built from the Software Heritage archive.

20235

  1. FundingHugging Face raises $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation

    On 24 August 2023 Hugging Face raised a $235 million Series D led by Salesforce Ventures, valuing the open-model hub at $4.5 billion, more than double its 2022 valuation, with chipmakers and cloud providers among the investors.

  2. ReleaseMeta releases Llama 2 for research and commercial use

    On 18 July 2023 Meta released Llama 2, a family of 7B, 13B and 70B parameter models free for research and commercial use under a custom license. Microsoft Azure, AWS and Hugging Face were among the platforms offering it.

  3. ReleaseBigCode releases the StarCoder open code model

    On 4 May 2023 the BigCode project, led by Hugging Face and ServiceNow, released StarCoder and StarCoderBase, two openly licensed code models of about 15.5 billion parameters trained on permissively licensed GitHub data.

  4. ReleaseHugging Face launches HuggingChat

    On 25 April 2023 Hugging Face released HuggingChat, a free chatbot it described as an open-source alternative to ChatGPT, running a LLaMA-based model built by the volunteer Open Assistant project.

  5. MilestoneEleutherAI launches a nonprofit research institute

    On 2 March 2023 EleutherAI, the volunteer group known for openly training GPT-3-like models, announced it had formed a nonprofit research institute backed by Stability AI, Hugging Face, Canva and others.

20223

  1. ReleaseStability AI publicly releases Stable Diffusion

    On 22 August 2022 Stability AI publicly released Stable Diffusion, a latent text-to-image diffusion model whose weights, code and model card were published on Hugging Face.

  2. ReleaseBigScience releases BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open multilingual model

    On 12 July 2022 the BigScience workshop, coordinated by Hugging Face, released BLOOM, a 176-billion-parameter language model covering 46 natural and 13 programming languages.

  3. FundingHugging Face raises $100 million at a $2 billion valuation

    On 9 May 2022 Hugging Face announced a $100 million Series C round led by Lux Capital, valuing the company at $2 billion; the round was framed as building the GitHub of machine learning.

20211

  1. AcquisitionHugging Face acquires Gradio

    On 21 December 2021 Hugging Face acquired Gradio, a Python library for building web demos of machine-learning models that Abubakar Abid had started in 2019 and that had been used to build more than 300,000 demos.

Models and products over time

8
  1. 2020
    • 2020 Hugging Face Hub Product

      The Hugging Face Hub is the platform where people share machine-learning models, datasets and demo apps. By September 2026 it had more than 3 million models and 18 million users.

  2. 2022
    • Jul 12, 2022 BLOOM Model

      BLOOM is a 176-billion-parameter open multilingual language model released on 12 July 2022 by the BigScience project, with weights available under a responsible-use license.

  3. 2023
    • Apr 25, 2023 HuggingChat Product

      HuggingChat is a free chatbot launched by Hugging Face on 25 April 2023 as an open-source alternative to ChatGPT. It initially ran the volunteer Open Assistant model and let users switch among open models.

    • May 4, 2023 StarCoder Model

      StarCoder is an open-access code language model of about 15.5 billion parameters, released on 4 May 2023 by the BigCode project led by Hugging Face and ServiceNow.

  4. 2024
    • Feb 28, 2024 StarCoder2 Model

      StarCoder2 is a family of open code models in 3B, 7B and 15B sizes, released in February 2024 by BigCode (Hugging Face and ServiceNow) with NVIDIA and trained on The Stack v2, published together with its dataset and training code.

    • Jul 16, 2024 SmolLM Model

      SmolLM is a family of small language models with 135M, 360M and 1.7B parameters, released openly by Hugging Face in July 2024 for on-device use and trained on a purpose-built corpus of generated textbooks, code and filtered web text.

    • Nov 2024 SmolLM2 Model

      SmolLM2 is Hugging Face's second family of small language models, released in November 2024 at 135M, 360M and 1.7B parameters, with open weights and a data-centric training recipe.

  5. 2025
    • Jul 8, 2025 SmolLM3 Model

      SmolLM3 is a 3-billion-parameter open model released by Hugging Face on 8 July 2025. It supports six languages and up to 128K tokens of context, with switchable reasoning, under Apache 2.0.

People3

Julien Chaumond2016–Clément Delangue2016–Thomas Wolf2016–

Investors3

NVIDIAAMDGoogle

Invested in1

EleutherAI

Contributed to2

Notes and sources

  1. Hugging Facehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugging_Face
  2. Hugging Face reaches $2 billion valuation to build the GitHub of machine learninghttps://techcrunch.com/2022/05/09/hugging-face-reaches-2-billion-valuation-to-build-the-github-of-machine-learning/
  3. Hugging Face raises $235M from investors, including Salesforce and Nvidiahttps://techcrunch.com/2023/08/24/hugging-face-raises-235m-from-investors-including-salesforce-and-nvidia
  4. AI startup Hugging Face now valued at $4.5 billionhttps://www.axios.com/2023/08/24/hugging-face-ai-salesforce-billion
  5. Gradio is joining Hugging Face!https://huggingface.co/blog/gradio-joins-hf
  6. XetHub is joining Hugging Face!https://huggingface.co/blog/xethub-joins-hf
  7. Hugging Face buys a humanoid robotics startuphttps://techcrunch.com/2025/04/14/hugging-face-buys-a-humanoid-robotics-startup
  8. ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AIhttps://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/19759
  9. Introducing The World's Largest Open Multilingual Language Model: BLOOMhttps://huggingface.co/blog/bloom
  10. Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billionhttps://forklog.com/en/nvidia-agrees-to-acquire-hugging-face-for-12-93-billion/
  11. Hugging Face breach by autonomous AI agent system exposed internal datasets, credentialshttps://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hugging-face-breach-autonomous-ai-agent-system-internal-datasets-credentials/

Cite this page: Hugging Face. TellWorld, https://www.tellworld.net/companies/hugging-face. Updated 2026-11-08