Hugging Face Raises $235 Million in Series D Funding Round

Hugging Face, an open-source repository for AI models, has recently raised $235 million in a Series D investment round involving Google, Amazon, Nvidia, and Salesforce as demand for AI model access rises. 

Hugging Face is one of several companies gaining from the interest of investors in generative AI. Its most recent round leaves the company at a $4.5 billion valuation. Hugging Face acts like GitHub for machine learning and other AI models, codes, and datasets.

Google, Amazon, AMD, Intel, IBM, Nvidia, and Salesforce were among the investors in this round. All these companies have made large investments in the foundation models for generative AI or the processors that operate these models. 

Read More: UK to Invest £100m in AI Chips Production Amid Global Competition 

The latest amount of funding will be used, according to Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue, to grow the team, which is currently at 170, and invest in more open source AI and platform building. The investment, according to him, also highlights how crucial the open-source community is to the growth of the generative AI community.

Delangue said, “It’s a validation not only for Hugging Face, but also for the larger open-source AI ecosystem. Companies want to develop AI internally, and this requires open-source AI.” 

Numerous well-known generative AI models are available on Hugging Face, including Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion and Meta’s Llama 2 and its variants. Also, in February this year, Hugging Face chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud provider, which explains its participation in the funding.