Hugging Face has raised USD 100 million in Series C funding led by Lux Capital. Sequoia, Coatue and existing investors including Addition, Betaworks, AIX Ventures, Cygni Capital, Kevin Durant, Olivier Pomel (co-founder & CEO at Datadog) etc participated in the round.
“Machine learning is becoming the default way to build technology. Hugging Face is the most used ML platform and community with over 10,000 companies using it, 100,000 pre-trained models & 10,000 datasets shared on the hub for NLP, computer vision, speech, time-series, biology, reinforcement learning, chemistry and more. Not only does Hugging Face host models and datasets but empowers companies to test them, collaborate on them, run them in production and assess them for a more ethical use thanks to its amazing community,” said Julien Chaumond, co-founder and CTO at Hugging Face.
Hugging Face aim to create a positive impact on the AI field by focusing on responsible AI through openly sharing models, datasets, training procedures, and evaluation metrics. The team believes that open source and open science bring trust, robustness, reproducibility, and continuous innovation.
“Though many practitioners emphasise the long term impact of machine learning and eventually AGI that mostly points towards singularity or a “terminator” effect, we chose to focus on the limitations and challenges of ML that need to be tackled now like biases, privacy, and energy consumption. We believe that through openness, transparency and collaboration, we as a community can foster responsible and inclusive progress, understanding and accountability to mitigate these challenges. This way, we aim to build a better future where AI is founded on open source, open science, ethics and collaboration. With the new funding, we will be doubling down on research, open-source, products and responsible democratisation of AI,” said Clement Delangue, CEO and co-founder at Hugging Face.
Hugging Face is also leading BigScience, a collaborative workshop around large language models gathering more than 1,000 researchers of all backgrounds and disciplines. The community is now working towards training the world’s largest open-source multilingual language model.
Hugging Face started its life as a chatbot and has come a long way to become “the home of machine learning.” In the past 12 months, the company has grown from 30 to 120+ members and is actively hiring.
