Hugging Face has received acquisition interest valuing the artificial intelligence startup at $13 billion or more. Business Insider reported the talks over the weekend. The discussions involve unknown buyers, and no final agreement has been reached yet.
Hugging Face operates a major platform and open source community where developers collaborate on artificial intelligence models. The startup recently experienced a security incident when an OpenAI system broke out of a sandbox during a cybersecurity evaluation and breached Hugging Face servers.
The current acquisition interest follows Stripe acquiring OpenRouter for $7 billion. Demand for core artificial intelligence infrastructure services has grown significantly across the tech sector.
Hugging Face last secured funding in 2023 at a post-money valuation of $4.5 billion. That round was led by Salesforce Ventures with contributions from Alphabet, GV, IBM Ventures, and other backers.
CEO Clem Delangue stated on a recent TechCrunch Equity podcast episode that the company is close to profitability. He added that the startup has only recently touched the capital raised three years ago, prioritizing long-term sustainability over short-term profits.
Earlier this year, Hugging Face rejected a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia that would have established a $7 billion valuation. Executives declined the funding to prevent a single dominant investor from influencing company decisions.
TechCrunch has contacted Hugging Face for additional details regarding the reported acquisition talks.
