Open-source AI platform Hugging Face bags €217M from Salesforce Ventures, Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, IBM, others

Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform, announced on Thursday, August 24, that it has raised $235M (approximately €217M) in a Series D round of funding at a valuation of $4.5B.

Salesforce Ventures, Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Corporation, Qualcomm Ventures, IBM, and Sound Ventures participated in the round.

THe company says the additional funding will strengthen its position as the leading open-source and open-science artificial intelligence platform.

Additionally, the company will also use the funds to double its headcount and invest in technology. 

Currently, the company employs around 17 people. 

The announcement comes a year after raising $100M in a Series C funding round led by Lux Capital.

Hugging Face: Open-source AI platform

French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf founded Hugging Face initially as a chatbot app focused on teenagers. 

However, after open-sourcing the model behind the chatbot, the company pivoted to focus on being a platform for machine learning. 

The company serves as a community and data science platform, offering users a suite of tools to construct, train, and deploy machine learning models using open-source technologies and code. 

It also functions as a hub where diverse groups of data scientists, machine learning engineers, and researchers can collaborate, exchange insights, receive assistance, and actively participate in open-source initiatives.

Recently, IBM and Hugging Face announced a collaboration on watsonx, IBM’s generative AI platform, to help enterprises build, deploy and customise foundation models across multiple domains.

Within watsonx, AI builders can leverage models from IBM and the Hugging Face community, which are pre-trained to support a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including question answering, content generation and summarisation, text classification, and extraction.

IBM alone has contributed over 200 open models and datasets on Hugging Face, including the recent release of the Geospatial Foundation Model in partnership with NASA.

Hugging Face says that it has crossed over 1,000,000 models, datasets, and apps on the platform. 

These investors/partners alone shared over 1,000 open models and datasets and have over 10,000 users on Hugging Face already.