Hugging Face

Hugging Face, a French-American firm, offers an open-source and ML platform that allows developers and ML practitioners to collaborate and develop entire AI/ML models from training to deployment.

Hugging Face offers a range of tools for data science hosting and development. These include a platform akin to GitHub for AI code repositories, models, and datasets, along with web applications for demonstrating AI-powered applications. Additionally, it provides libraries for tasks such as dataset processing and model evaluation. It has an enterprise version of the platform that supports both software-as-a-service and on-premises deployments.

The company's paid features encompass AutoTrain, which streamlines and automates the process of training AI models; Inference API, which enables developers to host models without the need to manage underlying infrastructure; and Infinity, which is aimed at enhancing the processing speed of in-production models with data.

In addition, it also offers pre-trained NLP models like BERT, GPT-2, and GPT-3 in its repository, known as the "Model Hub," which serves as a platform for sharing, downloading, and fine-tuning pre-trained models, fostering collaboration and reusability in NLP applications.

Key customers and partnerships

As of February 2024, Hugging Face serves over 10,000 customers across 50,000+ organizations. Its revenue mainly stems from consulting contracts with major AI companies like NVIDIA, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Hugging Face entered a strategic partnership with Google Cloud to allow developers working on Hugging Face to leverage Google Cloud's infrastructure and Amazon to make its platform available on the AWS marketplace. It also partnered with SafeCoder, a code assistant solution, to incorporate it within the Hugging Face platform to help customers develop new codes as well as improve existing code while preserving code privacy. In addition, it partnered with Graphcore to release 10 new transformer models designed for Graphcore's IPUs.

Funding and financials

In August 2023, the company raised USD 235 million in a Series D funding round from Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, Salesforce, and Sound Ventures, bringing its post-money valuation to USD 4.5 billion. It planned to use the funds to further expand its efforts in research, enterprise, and startups and is set to recruit new talent to support its growth.

It was also reported that the company generated a revenue of USD 10 million in 2021 and maintained an annualized revenue ranging from USD 30 million to USD 50 million.