Hugging Face, the open-source AI platform, has successfully raised $235 million in a Series D funding round. The funding was led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from tech giants such as IBM, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Ashton Kutcher‘s Sound Ventures. With this latest funding round, Hugging Face’s valuation now stands at an impressive $4.5 billion.
Hugging Face serves as a developer community and platform, offering open-source AI and machine learning resources that include models, datasets, ML demos, and libraries. The company aims to accelerate AI deployment by providing MLOps solutions, including customized support, training, fine-tuning, deployment services, and APIs.
Among Hugging Face’s popular resources is the Transformers library, a Python package that contains open-source Transformer models for text, image, and audio tasks. This library is compatible with deep learning libraries such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, and JAX. The company also offers a platform called Hugging Face Hub, which hosts Git-based code repositories, models, datasets, and applications.
Founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face initially gained recognition for its chatbot app targeted at teenagers. However, in 2018, the company shifted its focus and released an open-source version of PyTorch BERT, the conversational AI model that powered its chatbot. This transition marked Hugging Face’s emergence as a machine learning platform.
Prior to this Series D round, Hugging Face had already raised $100 million in a Series C funding round led by Lux Capital in May 2022. At that time, the company expressed its commitment to tackling the limitations and challenges faced by machine learning, such as biases, privacy concerns, and energy consumption.
The newly secured funding will enable Hugging Face to expand its current team of 170 employees and invest in further enhancing its technology. CEO Clément Delangue commented on the company’s vision, stating, In five years, every tech company will be an AI company. The Information, a reputable source, even predicts that Hugging Face could generate more than $30 million in annual revenue.
Open source AI represents an alternative development paradigm to closed-source, commercial AI. Unlike the latter, open source AI is transparent and promotes community-driven enhancements. This openness allows for greater customization and scrutiny of the underlying software and frameworks.
IBM, one of the participants in Hugging Face’s latest funding round, has played a significant role in contributing over 200 open models and datasets to the platform. Notable among these contributions is the Geospatial Foundation Model, developed in collaboration with NASA. Additionally, IBM has plans to host Meta’s Llama 2-chat model within its watsonx AI platform, furthering its commitment to leveraging both third-party and proprietary AI models to foster open innovation.
Hugging Face’s latest funding success and its commitment to open source AI underline the company’s position as a prominent player in the field. As the demand for AI capabilities continues to grow, Hugging Face is poised to play an essential role in democratizing access to AI resources and driving innovation in the space.
