Hugging Face, a startup focused on open-source artificial intelligence, has secured a significant investment in its Series D funding round at a multi-billion-dollar valuation. Major tech industry players participated in the round, including Salesforce Ventures, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm Ventures, IBM, and Sound Ventures. According to CEO Clem Delangue, the company already supports a vast user community—over 10,000 users from these partners alone—and boasts more than 1 million models, datasets, and applications on its platform.
The newly raised capital is earmarked primarily for recruiting top engineering and research talent, said Delangue. This hiring surge aims to help Hugging Face maintain a competitive edge as the artificial intelligence industry accelerates, particularly following the surge of interest kicked off by the launch of OpenAI´s ChatGPT. Investors’ enthusiasm signals a broader shift as both corporations and venture capitalists recognize the strategic value of collaborative and open artificial intelligence ecosystems.
What distinguishes Hugging Face from other high-profile artificial intelligence companies is its commitment to collaboration and open-source development. Unlike competitors that monetize restricted access to proprietary models, Hugging Face allows developers to freely share, upload, and use code, models, and datasets. The company offers developer tools that facilitate the deployment of open-source models and related tasks, such as dataset cleaning and performance evaluation. Hugging Face envisions itself as an indispensable hub for artificial intelligence builders, much like GitHub is for software code, and the latest funding round is expected to further cement its role as a catalyst for democratizing machine learning worldwide.
