Open-Source AI Hub Attracts $235 Million from Tech Giants like Google, Nvidia, and Amazon

Hugging Face, the company behind an open-source Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform, has successfully raised $235 million, approximately 310 billion KRW, in a recent funding round. This has elevated the company’s valuation to $4.5 billion, roughly 6 trillion KRW, and has also attracted a lineup of prominent crypto investors.

TechCrunch reported on August 24 that the funding round saw participation from tech giants such as Google, Nvidia, Amazon, Qualcomm, Salesforce, Intel, AMD, and IBM.

Rapid Growth as the “GitHub for Machine Learning”

Hugging Face has experienced rapid growth through its platform, often referred to as the “GitHub for Machine Learning (ML).” The platform offers more than 120,000 open-source AI models and codes, over 20,000 datasets, and a variety of tools that make it easy to run AI models. It also provides access to sample applications, known as “Spaces,” that demonstrate how to use these AI models.

Enterprise Hub and Commercial Services

Since last year, Hugging Face has been offering a paid service through its “Enterprise Hub” platform, boasting over 1,000 corporate clients including Microsoft, Intel, and eBay. Companies can set up an internal Hugging Face environment for their software teams, where developers can access AI models and related tools.

Users can also utilize a commercial service called “AutoTrain” to automatically find the most suitable open-source AI model for their projects and upload training datasets to train the models. Developers can upload the AI models they create with AutoTrain to a commercial service called “Inference Endpoints,” which offers a managed cloud environment for hosting AI models.

Expansion and Future Plans

In collaboration with Nvidia, Hugging Face provides developers building LLM and AI applications with “DGX Supercomputing Cloud.” The company has also partnered with Amazon to extend its products to AWS and with Microsoft to offer its AI models through Azure Cloud.

Clement Delang, the CEO of Hugging Face, stated that the newly acquired funds would be used to build more open-source AI models and platforms, as well as to attract talent in the AI field.

Catching Up in the AI Funding Race

So far, Hugging Face has raised a total of $395.2 million, approximately 523.2 billion KRW, trailing behind other companies in the field such as OpenAI ($11.3 billion), Anthropic ($1.6 billion), Inflection AI ($1.5 billion), Cohere ($435 million), and Adapt ($415 million).

For more information, visit Hugging Face’s website.