Hugging Face

Hugging Face is a startup founded in 2016 in Paris that built the world's most widely used open-source infrastructure for artificial intelligence and natural language models. Originally launched as a teen chatbot, the company radically rethought its mission, transforming into the reference "Hub" for the global AI research and developer community: millions of models, datasets, and applications are hosted, shared, and freely reused on the platform, making Hugging Face as central to the AI ecosystem as GitHub is to software development. Commercial growth has tracked the open-source community's expansion: revenue grew from around $70 million in 2023 to about $130 million in 2024, driven by expanding enterprise services (model hosting, managed inference, collaboration tools for corporate AI teams). This growth attracted a new, massive funding round: in September 2025, Hugging Face raised €1.7 billion (about $2 billion), reaching a €11.7 billion ($13.5 billion) valuation — nearly triple the $4.5 billion valuation reached in August 2023 with a $235 million Series D backed by Google, Amazon, Nvidia, IBM, and Salesforce. Total capital raised by the company has thus reached roughly $3.2 billion. Hugging Face today holds a uniquely strategic position in the AI ecosystem: while maintaining a strong open-source ethos, it has become indispensable commercial infrastructure for major tech companies, which rely on the platform for distributing, fine-tuning, and deploying the world's most widely used AI models.