Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf as a chatbot app for teenagers. After the team open-sourced the model behind the app, developers showed more interest in the model than in the app, and the company changed course.
In 2017 the company moved to the United States to raise money. In March 2021 it raised a $40 million Series B. The same year the BigScience workshop led to BLOOM, an open multilingual model.
In May 2022 a Series C valued Hugging Face at $2 billion. In August 2023 it raised $235 million from Google, Amazon and Nvidia at a $4.5 billion valuation. Revenue was about $15 million in 2022.
In 2024 Hugging Face acquired XetHub. In April 2025 it acquired the French robotics firm Pollen Robotics. The company is privately held.