Clément Delangue

Clément Delangue is a French entrepreneur and the co-founder and chief executive of Hugging Face, a company he started in New York in 2016 together with Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf^[1].

From a chatbot app to a model hub

Hugging Face did not start out as an artificial intelligence infrastructure company. The product the founders launched was a chatbot app aimed at teenagers^[1]. Over the years that followed, Delangue led the company through a change of direction: the consumer chat app gave way to an open machine-learning platform and model hub^[1].

A model hub is a shared library rather than a single product. Developers and research groups upload trained models — the weights produced by training a neural network — along with the code needed to run them, and other people can download those models and build on them instead of training everything from scratch. Running a hub of this kind means the company's main asset is the collection itself and the people contributing to it, which is a different business from selling a chat app to individual users. Delangue has stayed in the chief executive role through that change^[1].

Funding the platform

In August 2023 the company announced a $235 million Series D round^[2]. Delangue announced the round and named the investors involved: Salesforce Ventures, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm Ventures, IBM and Sound Ventures^[2]. The list mixes chip makers, cloud providers and enterprise software companies, and it placed the company among the AI firms backed by several of the largest technology businesses at once.

Robotics

In April 2025 the company acquired Pollen Robotics. After the acquisition, Delangue said he wanted to "make Artificial Intelligence robotics Open Source"^[1]. The statement extended the company's open-source framing from software models to machines that act in the physical world.

The Nvidia agreement

In September 2026, Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face^[3]. Delangue said that wider adoption of open source needed more compute, support and visibility, and that all of the company's staff would stay^[3]. In a LinkedIn post he wrote that he was "super happy" to join forces with Nvidia, arguing that for open source to work at larger scale it needs "more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility"^[3].

What the record shows

The public statements Delangue has made about his own company share an argument: that open source is not only a licensing choice but a question of resources. Compute to train and run models, support for the people doing the work, collaboration between organisations and visibility for the results are, in his account, the conditions that let open development scale up^[3]. His tenure at Hugging Face runs from a teenage chatbot app in New York in 2016 to a platform whose investors include chip makers and cloud providers, and then to an agreement to be acquired by Nvidia^[1][2][3].