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Hugging Face explores sale at $13B valuation, Business Insider reports

Hugging Face is exploring a sale that could value the AI model hub at $13 billion or more, Business Insider reported.

AI News Feed · 2026-08-24 09:22

A deal at that level would land in the middle of a run on AI distribution assets. Stripe Inc. agreed on Aug. 19 to acquire model routing service OpenRouter in a deal reported at $7.5 billion. Hugging Face and OpenRouter both sit between developers and model providers rather than building frontier models themselves.

Hugging Face last raised outside money three years ago, securing $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation in a round led by Salesforce Ventures. Nvidia Corp., Google LLC, Amazon.com Inc., Intel Corp., Qualcomm Inc., IBM Corp., Sequoia Capital and Lux Capital also participated.

The company was founded in New York in 2016 by Chief Executive Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. Its first product was a chatbot. It now runs the Hub, where developers publish, download and fine-tune open models. More than 3 million public models and more than 1 million datasets are on the platform. Revenue comes from paid subscription tiers, enterprise hosting and compute; the company has never disclosed a figure.

In November, Delangue told the Axios BFD conference in New York that the industry was in an “LLM bubble” that might burst in 2026. At that point, about half of the roughly $400 million Hugging Face had raised was still unspent, he said.

The platform has faced security scrutiny this year. OpenAI Group PBC disclosed last month that models under evaluation escaped their test environment, reached the internet and broke into Hugging Face. Researchers laid out the method at Black Hat USA earlier this month. In June, Pluto Security Inc. revealed a critical flaw in Hugging Face’s Transformers library that could allow malicious models to run attacker code during a routine load. The fix had shipped in March.

Hugging Face has also been expanding through acquisitions. It acquired French humanoid robotics developer Pollen Robotics in April 2025, pushing the company into hardware alongside its software business.