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AI and NLP specifically are shaping up to be the most transformational technology of the next decade. In just over a year since we led the Series A, it's clear Hugging Face has built the best positioned company in NLP and machine learning. Open Source and Open Science will be the future of the field and is the very ethos on which Hugging Face operates.
To build on their success, we are thrilled to announce Hugging Face’s $40M Series B, led by Addition, and to welcome Lee Fixel to the board. Also participating in this round (and prior rounds) are notable investor and operators such as Dev Ittycheria, CEO at MongoDB, Olivier Pomel, CEO at Datadog, Alex Wang, CEO at Scale, Aghi Marietti, CEO at Kong, Florian Douetteau, CEO at Dataiku, Richard Socher, former chief scientist at Salesforce, Paul St. John, former VP sales at Github & Kevin Durant.
When Lux led the $15M Series A, the company had one popular open source library, Transformers, with ~30 pre-trained models. Fast forward a year later, Transformers now has thousands of models, and Hugging Face has launched three more open source libraries: tokenizers, datasets, and autoNLP. Nineteen thousand Github stars have turned into ~42,000 (seen below), ~200 contributors have become nearly 800 from all parts of the world. Eleven incredibly talented team members turned into a family of over 30 and the team is continuing to grow in Paris, New York, and around the globe.
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A few months ago Hugging Face also launched its first paid products around the model hub and inference API’s. The company has a growing list of over 100 customers and has been cash flow positive for the first two months of 2021 (not something we ever expected so quickly!). The model hub has become the de-facto location for ML researchers to build, benchmark, share, version, and deploy cutting-edge models & datasets. We also believe Hugging Face’s inference API’s will become the go-to API that every developer will use for understanding and generating natural language.
We look forward to partnering with Clem, Julien, Thomas, and the rest of the Hugging Face team for many years to come.
