We Raised $100 Million for Open & Collaborative Machine Learning 🚀

Summary

Hugging Face announced a 100 million dollar Series C funding round led by Lux Capital, alongside participants including Sequoia, Coatue, and several angel investors. The platform hosts over 100,000 pre-trained models and 10,000 datasets spanning natural language processing, computer vision, speech, and other scientific domains for more than 10,000 customer organizations. The company plans to use the capital to expand research, open-source initiatives, tooling, and efforts focused on mitigating machine learning limitations like biases, privacy risks, and energy consumption. In addition, the organization is directing the BigScience research workshop with over 1,000 participants to train a massive open-source multilingual language model. Following organizational growth from 30 to more than 120 employees in twelve months, the remote-friendly company is actively hiring across all positions and seniority levels.

Context

Machine learning has become pervasive across technology, but the field faces persistent challenges regarding biases, privacy, and energy consumption that require open collaboration, transparency, and shared evaluation metrics.

Approach / What changed

Hugging Face secured 100 million dollars in Series C funding to accelerate research, product development, open source, and responsible AI democratization, while expanding its team and leading collaborative projects like BigScience.

Takeaways

• Hugging Face raised 100 million dollars in Series C funding led by Lux Capital with participation from Sequoia, Coatue, and existing investors.
• The platform hosts 100,000 pre-trained models and 10,000 datasets across domains such as NLP, computer vision, speech, biology, and chemistry, supporting over 10,000 companies.
• Hugging Face is leading BigScience, an initiative uniting over 1,000 researchers across disciplines to train an open-source multilingual large language model.

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