Hugging Face has announced a $100 million Series C funding round led by Lux Capital, with participation from Sequoia, Coatue, and existing investors. The company, known for its open-source machine learning platform, plans to use the funds to accelerate research, grow its team, and promote responsible AI.
Since open-sourcing PyTorch BERT in 2018, Hugging Face has grown into the largest community for machine learning, hosting over 100,000 pre-trained models and 10,000 datasets across domains like NLP, computer vision, speech, and biology. The Hugging Face Hub now serves as a central repository for collaboration and deployment, used by over 10,000 companies.
Co-founder and CEO Clement Delangue emphasized the importance of openness in AI development. "We believe open source and open science bring trust, robustness, and continuous innovation," he said. The company is also leading the BigScience workshop, a collaborative effort involving over 1,000 researchers to create the world's largest open-source multilingual language model.
Despite the progress, Hugging Face acknowledges challenges such as bias, privacy, and energy consumption in machine learning. The new funding will support initiatives to address these issues through transparency and collaboration.
The company has expanded from 30 to over 120 employees in the past year, including notable hires like Dr. Margaret Mitchell and the Gradio team. Hugging Face is actively hiring for various roles and maintains a remote-friendly, decentralized work culture.
"Thanks to every contributor in our community and team, customers, partners, and investors for helping us reach this point," Delangue added. "Your contributions are key to building a better future where AI is founded on open source, open science, ethics, and collaboration."