Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue announced the name of new investors in a post on X.
“Super excited to welcome our new investors @SalesforceVC, @Google, @amazon, @nvidia, @AMD, @intel, @QualcommVenture, @IBM & @sound_ventures_ who all participated in @huggingface’s $235M series D at a $4.5B valuation to celebrate the crossing of 1,000,000 models, datasets and apps on the platform,” he posted.
According to a report by CNBC, Delangue said the funds will be focused on hiring talent to be competitive in the artificial intelligence space.
Hugging Face work model
While companies like OpenAI charge for the tools they are creating by offering APIs, Hugging Face works in a fashion similar to GitHub. It has a platform where developers can share code, models, data sets and also use the company’s developer tools to get open-source AI models up and running.
“AI builders are using Hugging Face all day, every day. Maybe in five years, you’re going to have like 100 million AI builders. And if all of them use Hugging Face all day, every day, we’ll obviously be in a good position,” Delangue said.
According to the company, it has 500,000 different AI models, 250,000 data sets, and has 10,000 paying customers. Hugging Face’s primary product is BLOOM, a website platform where users can upload models and their weights.
Earlier this year, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of Amazon, announced a collaboration with Hugging Face to make it easier to carry out AI work in Amazon’s cloud. At that time, Delangue said the next generation of BLOOM open-source AI model will be run on Trainium, a proprietary AI chip created by AWS.