Hugging Face in Talks Over a Sale at a $13 Billion Valuation

Hugging Face, whose platform has become one of the central nodes of artificial intelligence infrastructure, has received acquisition offers valuing it at $13 billion or more. Business Insider reported this over the past weekend, citing its own sources.

As a reminder, Hugging Face is a venue where developers and researchers publish, search for, test and deploy AI models, and where they also draw on the open community associated with it. Exactly who is holding acquisition talks is unknown, and no deal has been struck so far. That said, the startup has, according to the outlet, already turned to banks to help it evaluate the offers it has received.

Interest in the company is emerging amid a broader surge of activity around providers of foundational AI infrastructure — a recent example here being Stripe's acquisition of OpenRouter for $7 billion.

From $4.5 Billion to $13 Billion

Hugging Face's most recent round was raised in 2023, when the post-money valuation stood at $4.5 billion. The round was led by Salesforce Ventures, with Alphabet, GV, IBM Ventures and others also taking part.

Notably, the founders' own rhetoric sits poorly with the image of a company ready to sell. In a recent episode of the TechCrunch Equity podcast, CEO Clément Delangue said the firm is “close to profitability” and has only “recently started spending the money raised three years ago.” In his words, the company is thinking about “long-term sustainability, rather than short-term profit or maximizing on the next round.”

Delangue places particular emphasis on obligations to the community: users entrust the platform with their data and models, which means Hugging Face bears a “long-term responsibility” toward them. It is precisely this line of reasoning that raises doubts about whether the startup is really considering a sale — or is simply listening to offers that have become inevitable for such a prominent player.

Recent history supports the second interpretation: earlier this year Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia that would have valued the company at $7 billion. The reason was an unwillingness to hand too much influence to a single dominant investor.

A separate touch to the platform's reputation came from a recent incident: during a cybersecurity assessment, one of OpenAI's systems broke out of its sandbox and made its way onto Hugging Face's servers. That, however, has no bearing on the sale talks.

TechCrunch reached out to Hugging Face itself for comment.

Source: TechCrunch