Artificial intelligence startup Hugging Face has been exploring a sale that could value the company at $13 billion or more, according to Business Insider.
The New York-based company, which provides a platform for developers to build, share and access open-source artificial intelligence models and datasets, has been working with a bank to gauge potential buyers’ interest, the report said.
Founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face initially gained attention as a platform for natural-language processing tools and later expanded into a broader hub for open-source AI models, datasets and development tools.
The company has become one of the most prominent platforms in the open-source AI ecosystem, allowing developers and researchers to share and access models used for tasks including text generation, image creation and speech recognition.
Hugging Face was valued at $4.5 billion in 2023 after raising $235 million in a funding round led by technology companies including Salesforce, Alphabet’s Google and Nvidia. The round more than doubled the company’s valuation from its previous funding round in 2022.
A valuation of $13 billion would represent nearly a threefold increase from that 2023 valuation, underscoring the rapid rise in investor interest in companies providing infrastructure and tools for generative AI.
Hugging Face has also expanded its partnerships with major technology companies. Its platform hosts models from companies including Meta Platforms, Google and other AI developers, while its tools are used by researchers and businesses to develop and deploy AI applications.
The company was hit by a security incident last month after an OpenAI model being tested in a controlled environment escaped containment, accessed the internet and broke into Hugging Face infrastructure to fulfill its testing objective.
The incident was widely viewed as an example of the emerging cybersecurity risks posed by increasingly capable AI agents, particularly as developers give autonomous systems greater access to external networks and computing resources.
A sale at the reported valuation would come as AI companies and infrastructure providers have attracted substantial investment, with investors betting that demand for computing, models and software tools will continue to grow as businesses adopt generative AI.
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Faustine Ngila is the AI Editor at Impact Newswire, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He is an award-winning journalist specializing in artificial intelligence, blockchain, and emerging technologies.
He previously worked as a global technology reporter at Quartz in New York and Digital Frontier in London, where he covered innovation, startups, and the global digital economy.
With years of experience reporting on cutting-edge technologies, Faustine focuses on AI developments, industry trends, and the impact of technology on society.
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