Hugging Face

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 in New York City by the French entrepreneurs Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, first as a chatbot app for teenagers. It is a privately held company headquartered in Brooklyn, New York. In August 2023 it raised a $235 million round at a $4.5 billion valuation, backed by Salesforce, Google and Nvidia.

It builds the main public platform for sharing machine learning work: the Hugging Face Hub with models, datasets and demo apps called Spaces, plus Inference Providers, Inference Endpoints and the HuggingChat assistant. Its open-source Transformers library is widely used to download, train and run pretrained models, and it publishes its own small models such as SmolLM and SmolVLM. In April 2025 it bought the robotics startup Pollen Robotics.

According to Wikipedia, Hugging Face had about 250 employees in 2025; the company does not publish a headcount on the pages checked. Its organisation page on the Hub lists 187 team members. Only the Brooklyn headquarters is confirmed from the sources used, and the company hires remotely.