Initially a simple chatbot for teenagers, Hugging Face, a benchmark in AI, is now valued at $2 billion. The open-source platform has raised a record $100 million and unveils a vision that's more ambitious than ever. Zoom in on this American unicorn with French roots.
Hugging Face: the reference platform for machine learning
Hugging Face is an American start-up founded in 2016 by three Frenchmen: Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Roch. A simple conversational agent project, with lots of humor, for teenagers, the company aroused interest and completed several fundraisings, including one for $100 million from Sequoia Capital.
All this was not enough for the company, which changed course midstream. A change which, according to Julien Chaumond, was not a problem.This turnaround was not a problem for investors. It has to be said that we chose our investors well...they're people who didn't bet on a specific idea, but who invested in the team, with a desire to accompany us as entrepreneurs and who are interested in the Machine Learning field.".
Hugging Face thus became a company providing open source natural language processing (NLP) technologies. A value proposition that quickly won over customers, with over 10,000 companies now using Hugging Face, including Google, Pfizer and Microsoft.
AI at the heart of corporate strategies
Hugging Face is one of the few start-ups that doesn't need to raise funds, yet is inundated with requests from venture capitalists. These investments have provided Hugging Face with substantial funds for its development. In the words of the companyWe still have a lot of cash because we haven't spent our last round yet. But the momentum around machine learning is such that we've taken advantage of it to ramp up and accelerate."
Today, artificial intelligence is omnipresent, whether you're searching Google, managing your social network posts or ordering an Uber, it's there. At the heart of corporate strategies, artificial intelligence has become essential, and Hugging Face has understood this.
Today, the platform boasts 100,000 models and 10,000 datasets, some of which are monetized thanks to its freemium model.
A $2 billion valuation
As soon as the start-up was launched, the founders managed to raise $1.2 million. One fund-raising round followed another. 4 million dollars in 2018, 15 million in 2019, 40 million in 2021 and finally...100 million in 2022 from Sequoia Capital.
These start-ups have more than doubled in size every year, enabling the American start-up to be valued at $2 billion today.
Hugging Face: key information
Number of employees to date
By 2021, the company will have 120 employees, most of them based in Paris.
Sales figures
The American company's sales figures are not known.
Going public
Despite a valuation of up to $2 billion, Hugging Face is not yet listed on the stock exchange, and has not announced its intention to go public.
Scalability
The ability to accommodate 10,000 corporate users and to offer services to both free users and large corporations is testament to its flexibility and ability to adapt to changing market needs. Hugging Face has positioned itself as the benchmark for machine learning, to support future innovation and development in this fast-growing field.
Mantra/Citation CEO
" We want to accelerate the availability of next-generation Machine Learning models, making them more accessible to the community and helping developers achieve better performance at lower cost " - Hugging Face.
