TechFlow news, according to The Information, artificial intelligence startup Hugging Face has announced a $235 million Series D funding round. Investors include Alphabet (Google's parent company), Amazon, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm Ventures, IBM, Salesforce Ventures, and venture capital firm Sound Ventures. The company is now valued at $4.5 billion post-funding. Hugging Face plans to use the funds to expand hiring and invest further in its technology.
Founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face initially started as a company developing chatbot applications for teenagers. After open-sourcing models behind its chatbots, the company shifted direction to focus on becoming a machine learning platform that hosts user-shared machine learning models, datasets, and related tools.
