Hugging Face acquires humanoid-robot maker Pollen Robotics

Background

Pollen Robotics was founded in 2016 in Bordeaux, France, by Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet.^[2] The company worked on humanoid robots: machines built around the human body plan, with arms and a head, so that they can in principle use tools, workstations and spaces designed for people rather than for machines.

The two organisations were not strangers when the deal was announced. They had already built "Le Robot", an open-source robot trained to do household chores, in the year before.^[3] Pollen's humanoid robot, Reachy 2, was likewise a machine the two companies had already been working on together.^[1] The acquisition, in other words, folded an existing collaboration into a single company.

The deal

On 14 April 2025, Hugging Face announced that it had acquired Pollen Robotics. The price was not disclosed.^[1]

For Hugging Face, the acquisition was its first move into hardware.^[1] The company had until then been known on the software and model side of machine learning, as a place where people share and run models. Its robotics team was led by Remi Cadene, formerly of Tesla's Optimus program.^[1]

The robot and the code

Reachy 2, Pollen's humanoid robot, came with the acquisition.^[1] According to Wired, Hugging Face planned to sell the robot and let developers download and suggest improvements to its code.^[3]

That pairing is the unusual part. In software, open source is a familiar arrangement: the source code is published, anyone can read it, and outsiders can propose fixes and additions that the maintainers decide whether to accept. A robot is harder, because the machine itself still has to be manufactured, assembled and shipped, and every unit costs real money to build. Selling the body and opening the code can therefore coexist.

Household chores, the task given to Le Robot, show why that is a demanding target rather than a demo trick. A kitchen or a living room is cluttered and unpredictable, and its objects are sized for human hands and placed for human height.^[3]

Why it matters

Clément Delangue said he wanted to "make Artificial Intelligence robotics Open Source".^[2]

Measured by scale alone, this is an acquisition whose price was not disclosed, and the facts around it are few. What it points at is nonetheless clear: an artificial-intelligence company moving from models that live on servers to machines that move through rooms.

Openness plays two practical roles here. The first is checkability. Once the code is public, outside researchers can see how a robot actually behaves instead of relying on a vendor's description, and can reproduce a result rather than take it on trust. The second is participation. Developers can change the code and send the changes back, so what the robot is capable of stops being a decision made by one company alone.^[3]

The costs are equally plain. A hardware business needs manufacturing partners, assembly and repair, which are different skills from training and serving models. Publishing the code also means other people may use it for things the original company never intended.

What the deal settled is narrower but concrete: a finished humanoid robot, a robotics team with hardware experience under Remi Cadene, and a stated aim of open-source AI robotics now sit in the same place.^[1][2]