The first product was a chatbot for teenagers. It was not meant to change how artificial intelligence gets built. Hugging Face, founded in 2016 by the French entrepreneurs Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, began as an app for bored teens to chat with, named after the hugging emoji.
The app was the founders' idea. What happened next was not. When they open-sourced the model behind it, developers took notice of the model and ignored the app. The company followed its users: it became a machine-learning platform where people share models and code, and in 2017 it moved to the United States to raise money.
The company had effectively become neutral ground in the AI race: rivals with competing models still all pointed their users to its hub.
Delangue's path to that moment began early. Press profiles describe him as a teenager who was one of the most visible French sellers on eBay at 17, and later a graduate of the ESCP business school who turned down a job at Google. He also co-founded Moodstocks, a Paris image-recognition startup that Google acquired in 2016. Those details come from profiles rather than a long interview I could read in full, so treat them as sketches, not a biography.
What almost nobody saw coming in 2016 was how large the pivot would grow. In March 2021 Hugging Face raised a USD 40 million Series B. In May 2022 a Series C valued it at USD 2 billion on revenue of about USD 15 million. It also launched the BigScience workshop in 2021, a collaboration that produced BLOOM, an open multilingual language model.
The real prize arrived in August 2023, when Google, Amazon and Nvidia put in USD 235 million at a USD 4.5 billion valuation. The company had effectively become neutral ground in the AI race: rivals with competing models still all pointed their users to its hub.
Being the commons has costs. Researchers found more than 1,500 exposed API tokens belonging to big tech firms, a 2024 study reported at least a hundred malicious models, and questions about copyrighted training data keep coming. In 2024 it bought XetHub to improve how it stores huge files, and in April 2025 it acquired the French robotics company Pollen Robotics, a sign it wants to move from software into machines.
The lesson for a first-time founder is humble. The product you set out to build may not be the one people want from you. Hugging Face survived by listening to what its users took and ignored, and by being willing to throw its own app away.