Hugging Face AI startup raised $235 million in a series D funding round. Hugging Face raises $235M from investors, including Salesforce. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff verified the information on X. The section had participation from Salesforce, Nvidia, IBM, Intel, Google, AMD, Amazon, Sound Ventures, and Qualcomm valuing Hugging Face at $4.6 billion, That’s twice the startup’s valuation from May 2022 and more than a hundred times Hugging Face’s annual revenue, showing the enormousness of AI and platforms supporting its development.
Hugging Face offers data science hosting and development tools, a GitHub-like hub for AI code archives, models, datasets, and web applications to demonstrate AI-powered applications. It makes available libraries for tasks like dataset processing and evaluating models in addition to an enterprise version of the hub to support software-as-a-service and on premise deployments.
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Its main functionality includes Inference API, which allows developers to host models without managing the underlying structures; Autotrain, which computerizes the task of training models; and Infinity, which is made to increase speed which is an in-production process date.
Co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue, a French entrepreneur, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, launched Brooklyn-based Hugging Face in the year 2016 The trio built a chatbot app for teenagers. After open-sourcing the algorithm behind the app, Hugging Face changed to focus on creating a platform for creating, testing, and machine learning.
What it delivers falls into MLOps(a category of tools for streamlining the process of taking AI models to production and monitoring them). The MLOps market is strong in its own right, with one report estimating that it’ll reach $16.61 billion by 2030.
Hugging Face dabbles in other areas
Hugging Face has launched BigScience in 2021, a volunteering project to produce an open-source language model as powerful as OpenAI’s GPT-3, but it will be free and open for anyone to use. It came to a head in Bloom, a multilingual model that for a year was available to tinker.
Bloom is but one of the several open-source models to which Hugging Face has contributed development resources.
It has collaborated with ServiceNow, an enterprise software company, releasing a free code-generating AI model called StarCoder (a follow-up model, SafeCoder, launched this week). And the startup made available a free version of ChatGPT.
Hugging Face recently collaborated with Nvidia to expand its access to the cloud via Nvidia’s DGX computing platform. It has a partnership with Amazon to reach AWS customers and leverage Amazon’s custom Trainium chips to train the next generation of Bloom. It has collaborated with Microsoft on Hugging Face Endpoints on Azure.
With this new investment, Delangue says that Hugging Face’s future plans are to “double down” on its supportive efforts in many domains, including research, enterprise, and startups with its 170 employees, with plans on recruiting new talent in the coming months.
Hugging Face has raised a total of $395.2 million to date, with the first-ever check coming from Betaworks Ventures, placing it among the better-funded AI startups in the space. Those ahead of it are OpenAI ($11.3 billion), Anthropic ($1.6 billion), Inflection AI ($1.5 billion), Cohere ($435 million) and Adept ($415 million).