Following the popularity of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT, several AI startups like Microsoft-backed Inflection AI and Google-backed Runway have raised funding.
Now, a US-headquartered AI startup Hugging Face has picked up a whopping $235 million Series D funding at a valuation of $4.5 billion. With this round, the total funding raised by Hugging Face accounts for $395.2 million.
The investment round was backed by technology heavyweights, such as Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, and Salesforce. Besides these, Ashton Kutcher-backed venture capital firm Sound Ventures also participated in the round.
Hugging Face will use the fresh capital to double down on hiring and invest in the technology.
“AI is the new way of building all software. It’s the most important paradigm shift of the decade and, compared to the software shift, it’s going to be bigger because of new capabilities and faster because software paved the way,” said co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue. “Hugging Face intends to be the open platform that empowers this paradigm shift.”
GitHub for AI code repositories
Hugging Face was founded by Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf in 2016. Built as a chatbot app targeted at teenagers, it started focusing on creating a platform for creating, testing and deploying machine learning.
It offers a number of data science hosting and development tools, including a GitHub-like hub for AI code repositories, models and datasets. The company offers an open-source library for users to build, train, and deploy AI chat models.
Currently, the company has a headcount of 170 and 10,000 customers. It claims that over 50,000 organisations are available on the platform. Also, its model hub hosts over 1 million repositories.
