This young shoot recently closed a major fundraiser, which brings together the biggest players in tech.
Among French unicorns, we all know Doctolib or BlaBlaCar, but very few of us have heard of Hugging Face. However, this very young French company, specializing in artificial intelligence, is making a name for itself across Silicon Valley.
A young French shoot valued at 4.5 billion dollars
Hugging Face is a company created in 2016 and recognizable among a thousand with its logo representing a smiling smiley who reaches out for a hug. The tech giants also opened their arms to him, during a fundraiser that enabled the French start-up to raise no less than 265 million dollars. Among the players who participated in the round table, we find NVIDIA, Google, Amazon, Intel, AMD, IBM, or even Qualcomm, but also lesser known players such as Sound Ventures, the private equity company of the American actor Ashton Kucher.
This is the second successful fundraising for Hugging Face, after a first carried out in 2022 with American investment funds, which had enabled it to raise 100 million dollars.
With this new table, the French company, which operates today between Paris and New York, is valued at 4.5 billion dollars.
An open source approach to artificial intelligence that appeals to the Meta group
Hugging Face is one of the heavyweights in the field of open source artificial intelligence today. Its platform allows other companies to deposit their pre-trained language models and test them with other players, who can also make their own modifications.
It is this platform that Meta notably chose to host Llama 2, its own language model. On the other side, companies as well known as Renault, Pfizer or Roche use these libraries as basic supports to then design their own artificial intelligence tools. This model is therefore the opposite of that adopted by OpenAI, which licenses the use of its GPT-4 language model and retains absolute control of it.
Hugging Face is making rapid progress and has entered into a partnership with NVIDIA. The manufacturer has announced that the services of the French company will be hosted on its DGX cloud, which houses supercomputers specialized in AI. Another deal of the same order was made in parallel with Amazon.
The money thus collected will allow Hugging Face to increase its workforce, but also, if the opportunity arises, to make acquisitions. Julien Chaumond, the company’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, explains, however, that “there are no specific plans at the moment “.
Sources: The echoes, Capital
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