Hugging Face
huggingface.coFounding Story
Founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf. Originally started as a chatbot company, they open-sourced their underlying NLP library (Transformers) which rapidly became the central hub for machine learning models.
Key Milestones
On April 28, 2021, the company launched the BigScience Research Workshop in collaboration with several other research groups to release an open large language model.
In June 2024, the company announced, along with Meta and Scaleway, their launch of a new AI accelerator program for European startups.
In April 2025, Hugging Face announced that they acquired a humanoid robotics startup, Pollen Robotics, based in France and founded by Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet in 2016.
In early 2026, hackers hijacked the Hugging Face platform to launch Android-targeted attacks involving "powerful malware" which could completely take over a compromised target.
Funding History
| Date | Round | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | Series A | $15M |
| 2022 | Series C | $100M |
| 2023 | Series D | $235M |