# Hugging Face — Open-source hub for AI models, datasets, and apps. Hugging Face runs the central platform where the machine-learning community shares, runs, and builds on open models, datasets, and demos, and maintains the Transformers library that became the standard way to use AI models. Founded 2016 Headquarters Paris, France Category Developer Tools, Open Source, Foundational AI Legal name Hugging Face, Inc. Legal domicile Delaware, United States Hugging Face’s legal entity is domiciled in Delaware, United States, outside Europe — which is a bit uncool. ## Highlights Notable milestones from Hugging Face’s journey — funding rounds, launches, and other moments worth knowing. Acquisition - Apr 2025 ### Buys Pollen Robotics to put open-source robots on the Hub Hugging Face acquired French startup Pollen Robotics and its Reachy humanoid robots, betting that robotics needs the same open, shared foundation as models — and reconnecting the company with its French roots. **Reachy, the open-source robot Hugging Face brought onto the Hub via Pollen Robotics.** [Source](https://huggingface.co/blog/hugging-face-pollen-robotics-acquisition) Milestone - Sep 2024 ### The Hub passes a million models — the GitHub of machine learning Hugging Face crossed a million hosted models, on its way to millions more alongside datasets and runnable Spaces. The Hub had become the default place open AI is published, found, and run. **The Hub's model index — by 2025 home to millions of openly shared models.** [Source](https://huggingface.co/models) Acquisition - Aug 2024 ### Acquires XetHub to rebuild storage under the Hub In what Delangue called its largest acquisition to date, Hugging Face bought Seattle-based XetHub — ex-Apple ML infrastructure engineers — to replace Git LFS with chunk-level storage built for the terabytes of models and datasets flowing through the Hub. [Source](https://huggingface.co/blog/xethub-joins-hf) Funding - Aug 2023 ### $235M Series D at a $4.5B valuation, backed by every chip and cloud giant Salesforce led a round joined by Google, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, IBM and Sound Ventures — rivals who all depend on the Hub lining up behind it. The raise doubled Hugging Face's valuation and made it a clear AI unicorn. Round Series D Raised $235M Valuation $4.5B Led by Salesforce Ventures [Source](https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/24/hugging-face-raises-235m-from-investors-including-salesforce-and-nvidia/) Launch - Jul 2022 ### BLOOM ships a 176B-parameter open multilingual LLM The output of BigScience — a year-long collaboration of over 1,000 researchers Hugging Face convened — BLOOM matched GPT-3's scale across 59 languages and was released openly, a deliberate counter to the closed frontier labs. [Source](https://huggingface.co/blog/bloom) Funding - Mar 2021 ### $40M Series B to scale the model Hub Lee Fixel's Addition led the round as the Hub was turning into the place the ML community shares models and datasets. The same year, Hugging Face folded in Gradio to let anyone wrap a model in a shareable web demo. Round Series B Raised $40M Led by Addition [Source](https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/11/hugging-face-raises-40-million-for-its-natural-language-processing-library/) Launch - Sep 2019 ### The Transformers library makes state-of-the-art AI a pip install By open-sourcing the tooling behind models like BERT and GPT-2, Transformers turned cutting-edge research into a few lines of Python. It quickly became the default way researchers and engineers load and run models, and the foundation of everything Hugging Face built next. [Source](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers) Team - Jan 2016 ### Three French founders start out building a chatbot for teenagers Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf founded Hugging Face in New York — named after the 🤗 emoji — as a playful teen chatbot. They soon realised the open-source ML tooling underneath was the real product and pivoted to it. [Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugging_Face)