Hugging Face explores a sale at a $13bn valuation, nearly triple its last one

Hugging Face has retained bankers to test the market for a sale at a valuation of $13bn or higher, according to Business Insider, which reported that talks are early and that no bidder has been identified.

It is a striking development for a company that has spent the past decade positioning itself as the neutral ground of machine learning, and that only recently went looking for help with compute costs by asking OpenAI for $100mn of it.

The number represents close to a tripling of the $4.5bn valuation Hugging Face carried after its last outside round, a $235mn raise in August 2023 led by Salesforce Ventures with Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Intel, Qualcomm, IBM, Sequoia Capital, and Lux Capital alongside. That the company has not raised externally since is unusual in a sector where three years is several funding cycles.

Founded in New York in 2016 by Clement Delangue, Julien...

Copyright of this story solely belongs to thenextweb.com. To see the full text click HERE