Hugging Face, Inc. is a French‑American AI company founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf. Originally conceived as a chatbot maker, the company pivoted to focus on open-source machine learning tooling and launched its core product, the Hugging Face Hub—a collaborative platform hosting models, datasets, and web applications. Today, it offers widely used libraries such as Transformers, Datasets, Diffusers, and Gradio, and provides both cloud-based and enterprise-hosted deployment options while serving customers across industries worldwide.

Hugging Face achieved a $4.5 billion valuation following its $235 million Series D round in August 2023, backed by tech giants like Salesforce, Google, Amazon, IBM, and Nvidia. Its business model blends freemium access to community tools with paid subscriptions, managed hosting, and consulting services, helping it grow from ~$10 million in revenue in 2021 to over $70 million in ARR by 2023, and reaching $130 million in revenue in 2024. The firm promotes a mission of democratizing AI through openness and ethical standards, launching global initiatives like the BigScience project and partnerships with AWS and UNESCO to extend multilingual model access and safety oversight.