Hugging Face is a developer of an open-source platform of machine learning technologies. It is building the GitHub of machine learning. The platform is community-driven, developers there can create, collaborate, and discover ML apps, ML models, and datasets. The Hugging Face’s aim is to catalyze and democratize NLP, which is considered to become the most transformative technology of the decade.
The funding round Series C was led by Lux Capital. Existing investors such as Addition, Betaworks, AIX Ventures, Cygni Capital, Kevin Durant, and Olivier Pomel also took part in the round. Sequoia Capital and Coatue Management invested for the first time. The money raised is planned to be used to support continuous development.
Hugging Face, New York, the USA, was founded by Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf in 2016. In the beginning, the company focused on a consumer app looking like another messaging app. Then, Hugging Face released the Transformers library on GitHub, as of now, it has 62 000 stars and 14 000 forks on the platform. With the help of Transformers, users can leverage popular NLP models, among them are BERT, GPT-2, T5, or DistilBERT, and use them to manipulate text in different ways. For example, it is possible to summarize, classify, generate text, extract information, etc. After the library’s success, Hugging Face became the main repository for all things related to machine learning models. Now, the client base of the company includes 10 000 companies.
