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Hugging Face

PrivateRank #19 by valueUnited StatesFounded 2016huggingface.co

Open AI collaboration company and platform for discovering, sharing, building, training, evaluating, and deploying machine-learning models, datasets, and applications. Hugging Face operates the Hub and develops widely used open-source libraries including Transformers, Datasets, Diffusers, Accelerate, and Gradio, alongside inference, enterprise, compute, and robotics products.

AI valuation
$12.9B*187%increase
Sep 3, 2026 · NVIDIA
Change vs Aug 24, 2023

September 20263

Sep 22, 2026Transformers adds native llama.cpp quant supportTransformers

Transformers added support for running llama.cpp GGUF quantized models within the library’s model-definition and inference workflows.

Sep 21, 2026Tokenizers v1 releasedTokenizers · 1.0

Hugging Face released Tokenizers v1, a major milestone for its Rust-based tokenization stack.

Sep 3, 2026NVIDIA agrees to acquire Hugging FaceAnnounced$12.9B deal · $12.9B* valuation

NVIDIA entered a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9303 billion. The companies said Hugging Face would retain its brand, platform, open-source commitments, and multi-cloud, multi-accelerator approach pending closing.

June 20261

Jun 26, 2026HF Jobs adds exposed service portsHF Jobs

HF Jobs added exposed-port workflows for running private services such as OpenAI-compatible vLLM servers directly on Hugging Face compute.

March 20261

Mar 10, 2026Storage Buckets launchedStorage Buckets

Hugging Face launched mutable, Xet-backed S3-like Storage Buckets for checkpoints, logs, traces, and intermediate AI data.

December 20251

Dec 1, 2025Transformers v5 release candidateTransformers · 5.0.0rc0

Transformers v5 entered release candidate with simplified model definitions, standardized attention interfaces, and support for more than 400 architectures.

October 20251

Oct 27, 2025huggingface_hub v1.0 releasedHugging Face Hub · 1.0

The core Hugging Face Hub Python client reached v1.0 with a redesigned hf CLI, httpx networking, and Xet-based file transfers.

September 20251

Sep 2025HUGS deployment containers discontinuedHUGS

Hugging Face discontinued HUGS model-deployment containers and directed users toward enterprise collections and other deployment paths.

July 20254

Jul 30, 2025Hugging Face expands into on-demand computeHugging Face Compute

The launch of HF Jobs established an on-demand compute layer alongside the Hub’s storage, collaboration, and inference products.

Jul 30, 2025HF Jobs launchedHF Jobs

Hugging Face launched pay-per-use compute jobs that run scripts and containers on CPUs and GPUs directly through the hf CLI.

Jul 9, 2025Reachy Mini launchedReachy Mini

Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics launched Reachy Mini, a compact open-source desktop robot aimed at developers, researchers, and educators.

Jul 8, 2025SmolLM3 3B releasedSmolLM3 3B

Hugging Face released a fully open 3B multilingual model with 128K context, switchable reasoning, tool use, and a disclosed training recipe.

June 20252

Jun 11, 2025Training Cluster as a Service announced with NVIDIATraining Cluster as a Service

Hugging Face and NVIDIA introduced a managed service for research organizations to access large GPU clusters for foundation-model training.

Jun 3, 2025SmolVLA releasedSmolVLA

Hugging Face released SmolVLA, a 450M vision-language-action model trained for affordable, open robotic manipulation.

May 20251

May 2025Xet-backed storage rolls out across the HubXet-backed Hub Storage

Hugging Face began broad deployment of Xet-based storage and transfers across Hub repositories, bringing deduplication and faster large-file operations.

April 20253

Apr 2025SO-101 robot arm releasedSO-101

LeRobot introduced the SO-101, a refined low-cost open robot arm for collecting demonstrations and training robotic policies.

Apr 14, 2025Pollen Robotics joins Hugging FaceLeRobot

Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics, maker of Reachy robots, to accelerate its open-source robotics strategy and connect physical hardware with the LeRobot ecosystem.

Apr 4, 2025Gradio reaches one million monthly usersGradio

Hugging Face reported that Gradio had reached one million monthly users, reflecting its adoption for open AI demos and applications.

February 20251

Feb 20, 2025SmolVLM2 releasedSmolVLM2

Hugging Face released SmolVLM2 at 256M, 500M, and 2.2B parameters with support for video understanding as well as images and text.

January 20255

Jan 28, 2025Inference Providers launchedInference Providers

Hugging Face launched a unified inference layer that lets developers call models across multiple providers through one API and billing experience.

Jan 25, 2025Open R1 project launchedOpen R1

Hugging Face launched Open R1 to openly reproduce and extend the data, training, and evaluation pipeline behind reasoning models.

Jan 23, 2025SmolVLM 500M releasedSmolVLM 500M

Hugging Face released a 500M vision-language model for low-memory multimodal inference.

Jan 23, 2025SmolVLM 256M releasedSmolVLM 256M

Hugging Face released a 256M vision-language model small enough for highly constrained devices while supporting image-and-text tasks.

Jan 16, 2025TGI adds multiple inference backendsText Generation Inference

Text Generation Inference added a multi-backend architecture supporting vLLM and TensorRT-LLM alongside its native backend.

December 20242

Dec 31, 2024smolagents library releasedsmolagents

Hugging Face released smolagents, a lightweight open-source framework for tool-using and code-executing AI agents.

Dec 19, 2024ModernBERT releasedModernBERT

Answer.AI and Hugging Face released ModernBERT, a modernized encoder-only model family for retrieval and classification workloads.

November 20243

Nov 28, 2024SmolVLM 2B releasedSmolVLM 2B

Hugging Face released SmolVLM, a compact 2B vision-language model designed to run with very low memory.

Nov 26, 2024Hub upload and download architecture rebuilt around XetXet-backed Hub Storage

Hugging Face detailed a new storage and transfer architecture using Xet’s content-defined chunking to accelerate large repository operations.

Nov 1, 2024SmolLM2 releasedSmolLM2

Hugging Face released the second generation of its 135M, 360M, and 1.7B compact language models with stronger instruction following.

October 20243

Oct 23, 2024Gradio 5 releasedGradio · 5.0

Gradio 5 introduced redesigned application theming, stronger security defaults, and improved AI app development workflows.

Oct 23, 2024HUGS inference microservices launchedHUGS

Hugging Face launched HUGS, optimized zero-configuration deployment containers for open generative models.

Oct 2024SO-100 low-cost robot arm releasedSO-100

The LeRobot community introduced the SO-100, a low-cost open robot arm design for data collection and imitation learning.

September 20241

Sep 13, 2024Accelerate 1.0 release candidateAccelerate · 1.0.0rc0

Accelerate reached its 1.0 release-candidate milestone after becoming a core distributed-compute layer in the Hugging Face ecosystem.

August 20242

Aug 2024IDEFICS3 releasedIDEFICS3

Hugging Face released IDEFICS3, a more efficient multimodal architecture that became the basis for the SmolVLM family.

Aug 8, 2024XetHub joins Hugging FaceXet-backed Hub Storage

Hugging Face acquired XetHub to bring content-defined chunking, deduplication, and high-performance storage to large AI repositories.

July 20241

Jul 16, 2024SmolLM releasedSmolLM

Hugging Face released compact fully open language models at 135M, 360M, and 1.7B parameter scales.

June 20243

Jun 26, 2024Open LLM Leaderboard 2 releasedOpen LLM Leaderboard

Hugging Face refreshed the Open LLM Leaderboard with a harder, contamination-resistant suite and new scoring methodology.

Jun 13, 2024Argilla joins Hugging Face

Hugging Face acquired Argilla, an open-source platform for human and synthetic data curation and model feedback.

Jun 2024FineWeb-Edu dataset releasedFineWeb-Edu

Hugging Face released FineWeb-Edu, an educationally filtered subset that showed strong gains for small-model pretraining.

May 20243

May 2024FineWeb dataset releasedFineWeb

Hugging Face released FineWeb, a 15-trillion-token filtered and deduplicated English web dataset for language-model pretraining.

May 21, 2024Microsoft and Hugging Face deepen AI collaboration

Microsoft and Hugging Face expanded their collaboration around open models, Azure AI, and enterprise deployment experiences.

May 2024LeRobot open robotics library launchedLeRobot

Hugging Face launched LeRobot to bring open models, datasets, policies, and reproducible tooling to real-world robotics.

April 20241

Apr 17, 2024IDEFICS2 releasedIDEFICS2

Hugging Face released IDEFICS2, an 8B visual-language model with stronger OCR, document, and visual reasoning capabilities.

February 20241

Feb 28, 2024StarCoder2 releasedStarCoder2

BigCode released StarCoder2 models at 3B, 7B, and 15B scales in collaboration with ServiceNow and NVIDIA.

January 20241

Jan 25, 2024Google Cloud strategic partnership

Hugging Face and Google Cloud announced a strategic partnership integrating the Hub with Google Cloud infrastructure, Vertex AI, and TPUs.

November 20232

Nov 2023Reachy 2 launchedReachy 2

Pollen Robotics launched Reachy 2, an open-source humanoid robot platform later brought into Hugging Face through its acquisition of Pollen.

Nov 2023Text Embeddings Inference releasedText Embeddings Inference

Hugging Face released a production-grade server for serving text embedding and reranking models.

October 20231

Oct 25, 2023Zephyr-7B-β releasedZephyr-7B-β

Hugging Face H4 released an improved Zephyr 7B beta model trained on expanded public and synthetic preference data.

September 20231

Sep 28, 2023Zephyr-7B-α releasedZephyr-7B-α

Hugging Face H4 released an aligned 7B chat model trained with distilled direct preference optimization.

August 20235

Aug 2023Candle Rust ML framework releasedCandle

Hugging Face released Candle, a minimalist Rust framework for fast and portable machine learning.

Aug 24, 2023Series D funding at $4.5 billion valuation$235M raised · $4.5B* valuation

Hugging Face raised $235 million in a Series D led by Salesforce Ventures at a $4.5 billion post-money valuation, with participation from major cloud and semiconductor companies.

Aug 22, 2023IDEFICS releasedIDEFICS

Hugging Face released IDEFICS, an 80B open-access visual-language model supporting sequences of images and text.

Aug 10, 2023Hugging Face launches in AWS MarketplaceHugging Face Hub

Hugging Face launched managed training and deployment offerings in AWS Marketplace, simplifying enterprise procurement and use on AWS.

Aug 8, 2023NVIDIA and Hugging Face bring DGX Cloud to developers

NVIDIA and Hugging Face announced a partnership to connect Hub developers with NVIDIA DGX Cloud for training and tuning generative AI models.

July 20231

Jul 2023Collections launched on the HubCollections

Hugging Face introduced Collections for curating and sharing related models, datasets, Spaces, and papers.

June 20231

Jun 2023Daily Papers launchedDaily Papers

Hugging Face launched a daily research-paper discovery feed connected to community profiles, models, datasets, and discussions.

May 20232

May 2023Open LLM Leaderboard launchedOpen LLM Leaderboard

Hugging Face launched an open and reproducible benchmark leaderboard for comparing community language models.

May 4, 2023StarCoder releasedStarCoder

BigCode released StarCoder, a 15.5B-parameter code model trained on permissively licensed code from The Stack.

April 20231

Apr 25, 2023HuggingChat launchedHuggingChat

Hugging Face launched HuggingChat, an open-source conversational interface initially powered by an OpenAssistant model.

February 20231

Feb 21, 2023AWS and Hugging Face expand strategic collaboration

AWS and Hugging Face announced a strategic collaboration to make generative AI more accessible and optimize Transformers training and deployment on AWS infrastructure.

January 20231

2023Team and Enterprise Hub plans introducedTeam & Enterprise Hub

Hugging Face expanded its organization offering with team and enterprise plans for private repositories, access control, governance, and support.

December 20221

Dec 2022PEFT library releasedPEFT

Hugging Face released Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning tools for adapting large models with methods such as LoRA.

November 20222

Nov 9, 2022BLOOMZ instruction-tuned models releasedBLOOMZ

BigScience released BLOOMZ and mT0, instruction-finetuned multilingual models derived from BLOOM and the xP3 task collection.

Nov 2022The Stack dataset releasedThe Stack

The BigCode project released The Stack, a large permissively licensed source-code dataset with tools for governance and opt-out.

October 20222

Oct 6, 2022Inference Endpoints launchedInference Endpoints

Hugging Face launched managed, autoscaling dedicated endpoints for deploying models from the Hub.

Oct 2022Text Generation Inference releasedText Generation Inference

Hugging Face released Text Generation Inference, a production server optimized for large-language-model generation.

August 20224

Aug 22, 2022Stable Diffusion support added to DiffusersDiffusers

Diffusers added first-class support for Stable Diffusion, enabling local and hosted generation workflows around the newly released open model.

Aug 3, 2022Hugging Face enterprise platform launchedHugging Face Enterprise

Hugging Face launched its enterprise platform around Private Hub, secure collaboration, governance, deployment, and organizational support.

Aug 3, 2022Private Hub launchedPrivate Hub

Hugging Face launched Private Hub as a secure and compliant platform for organizations to collaborate on models, datasets, and applications.

Aug 2022TRL training library releasedTRL

Hugging Face released Transformer Reinforcement Learning tooling for post-training language models with supervised, preference, and reinforcement-learning methods.

July 20222

Jul 2022Diffusers library launchedDiffusers

Hugging Face launched Diffusers, an open-source library providing modular pipelines for diffusion-based generative models.

Jul 12, 2022BLOOM 176B releasedBLOOM 176B

The BigScience workshop released BLOOM, a 176-billion-parameter multilingual language model trained on the Jean Zay supercomputer.

May 20222

May 2022Evaluate library launchedEvaluate

Hugging Face launched Evaluate as a unified framework for model and dataset evaluation.

May 9, 2022Series C funding at $2 billion valuation$100M raised · $2B* valuation

Hugging Face raised $100 million in Series C funding led by Lux Capital at a reported $2 billion post-money valuation.

March 20222

Mar 2022Dataset Viewer launchedDataset Viewer

Hugging Face introduced browser previews and automatic processing for datasets hosted on the Hub.

Mar 2022SafeTensors introducedSafeTensors

Hugging Face introduced SafeTensors as a fast tensor serialization format designed to avoid arbitrary-code execution.

December 20211

Dec 21, 2021Gradio joins Hugging FaceGradio

Hugging Face acquired Gradio, bringing its open-source interface framework and team into the company while keeping the project open source.

October 20211

Oct 5, 2021Gradio Spaces launchedSpaces

Hugging Face launched Spaces with native Gradio support, allowing community members to host interactive machine-learning demos on the Hub.

September 20211

Sep 2021Optimum optimization library launchedOptimum

Hugging Face launched Optimum to optimize Transformers models for specialized hardware and inference runtimes.

June 20211

Jun 2021AutoTrain launchedAutoTrain

Hugging Face launched AutoTrain to automate model training and fine-tuning from user-provided datasets.

May 20212

May 2021Hugging Face PRO subscription launchedHugging Face PRO

Hugging Face introduced a paid individual plan with expanded private, storage, and compute capabilities on the Hub.

May 2021BigScience research workshop launchedBLOOM

Hugging Face helped launch the BigScience open research workshop, coordinating an international collaboration to train a large multilingual language model.

April 20211

Apr 16, 2021Accelerate library launchedAccelerate

Hugging Face launched Accelerate to let PyTorch code run across distributed hardware with minimal changes.

March 20211

Mar 11, 2021Series B funding round$40M raised

Hugging Face raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Addition to grow its open-source machine-learning ecosystem and hosted platform.

November 20201

Nov 19, 2020Transformers v4 release candidateTransformers · 4.0.0rc1

Transformers v4 began its release cycle with broad framework and architecture support and a standardized model API.

July 20202

Jul 2020Hugging Face begins hosted model inference servicesHugging Face Inference

Hugging Face began its hosted inference platform with a serverless API for models on the Hub, later expanding into dedicated endpoints and provider routing.

Jul 2020Hosted Inference API launchedInference API

Hugging Face introduced a hosted API for running models from the Hub without managing serving infrastructure.

May 20204

May 26, 2020Dataset Hub launches with Datasets libraryDataset Hub

Hugging Face launched hosted dataset repositories alongside its Datasets library, creating a shared catalog for reusable machine-learning data.

May 26, 2020Datasets library launchedDatasets

Hugging Face released a unified open-source library and catalog for loading, processing, streaming, and sharing datasets.

May 2020Model Hub opens for collaborative model sharingModel Hub

Hugging Face made model repositories a central Hub product for versioning, documenting, discovering, and reusing pretrained models.

May 2020Hugging Face Hub launches as collaborative ML platformHugging Face Hub

Hugging Face expanded from an NLP library into a Git-based collaboration platform for sharing models and machine-learning artifacts.

March 20201

Mar 2020Tokenizers library releasedTokenizers

Hugging Face introduced its high-performance Rust-backed Tokenizers library for production-scale text preprocessing.

December 20191

Dec 17, 2019Series A funding round$15M raised

Hugging Face raised $15 million in a Series A led by Lux Capital to expand its open-source natural-language-processing platform.

October 20191

Oct 2, 2019DistilBERT releasedDistilBERT

Hugging Face released DistilBERT, a smaller and faster distilled BERT model retaining most of the teacher model’s language-understanding performance.

September 20191

Sep 26, 2019Library renamed TransformersTransformers · 2.0.0

Hugging Face renamed pytorch-transformers to Transformers and expanded the library’s framework and architecture support.

January 20191

2019Gradio open-source interface framework launchedGradio

Gradio launched as an open-source Python framework for rapidly building browser interfaces around machine-learning models.

October 20181

Oct 11, 2018PyTorch-Pretrained-BERT releasedTransformers · 0.1.0

Hugging Face released an open-source PyTorch implementation and pretrained checkpoints for BERT, the project that evolved into the Transformers library.

May 20181

May 2018Seed funding round$4M raised

Hugging Face raised a $4 million seed round backed by investors including A.Capital, Betaworks, SV Angel, and Thirty Five Ventures.

March 20171

Mar 2017Angel funding round$1.2M raised

Hugging Face raised approximately $1.2 million in early angel funding to develop its conversational AI startup.

January 20161

2016Hugging Face founded

Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf founded Hugging Face in New York, initially building a conversational AI companion before pivoting toward open machine learning.

* Market cap / valuation. Company values are AI-attributed: the latest market cap or valuation × the share attributed to AI (100% for pure AI companies). Methodology