Julien Chaumond is a co-founder of Hugging Face and its chief technology officer. He started the company in 2016 with Clement Delangue, who is CEO, and Thomas Wolf, who is chief science officer.
The first product was a chatbot app for teenagers. After the team open-sourced the model behind it, developers asked for the models, not the app. The founders pivoted into a platform where researchers share and download models.
In 2017 the company moved to the United States to raise money. In 2021 the BigScience workshop led to the open multilingual model BLOOM. In 2022 Hugging Face reached a $2 billion valuation, and in August 2023 it raised $235 million from Google, Amazon and Nvidia at $4.5 billion.
The company bought XetHub in 2024. In April 2025 it acquired the French robotics firm Pollen Robotics. Hugging Face is privately held.