Hugging Face is a French-American AI company based in New York City that provides an open-source platform for machine learning development. Founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf as a chatbot app for teenagers, the company pivoted to focus on a community-driven machine learning hub after open-sourcing its underlying models.

Hugging Face is often described as the “GitHub for AI” — a central repository where developers and researchers share pre-trained models, datasets, and code across natural language processing, computer vision, and other ML domains. The platform hosts over 1 million models and 250,000 datasets, with a global community of more than 2 million users.

Their open-source libraries — especially Transformers — have become industry-standard tools for modern AI development. Hugging Face also provides enterprise offerings such as Private Hub, AutoTrain, Inference API, and Infinity, which help companies scale and deploy models efficiently.

In recent years, Hugging Face has expanded through strategic acquisitions, including Gradio and Pollen Robotics, to broaden its footprint in model interface design and robotics. In August 2023, the company raised $235 million in Series D funding at a $4.5 billion valuation, backed by leading investors such as Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, and Salesforce.

With a globally distributed team of over 270 employees, Hugging Face continues to lead the open-source AI ecosystem, accelerating collaboration and innovation across the machine learning community.