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 Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face started as a chatbot company and pivoted into the infrastructure layer beneath everyone else’s models. Its Hub now hosts more than three million public models and around a million datasets, which is what makes it strategically interesting to a buyer and awkward to price.
Revenue comes from paid subscription tiers, enterprise hosting, and compute services sold on top of the free repository, and the company has never published figures. As of November 2025, roughly half of the $400mn or so it had raised over its life remained unspent, which is a reasonable position from which to negotiate and a poor one from which to be forced into anything.
