Quick Facts
- Hugging Face is exploring a sale at a valuation of $13 billion or more, nearly triple its $4.5 billion Series D valuation from 2023.
- The company has hired a bank to contact potential buyers, though no agreement has been signed and a deal may not happen.
- Hugging Face generated approximately $130 million in revenue in 2024, up from $70 million the prior year.
Hugging Face, the New York-based AI model hub, is exploring a sale that could value the company at $13 billion or more, according to a Business Insider report cited by SiliconAngle. The company has hired a bank to sound out potential buyers, though no buyer has been named and no deal has been signed.
A transaction at that level would nearly triple the $4.5 billion valuation Hugging Face carried after its $235 million Series D in 2023. That round included Salesforce, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, and Intel.
The company has not raised outside capital since 2023, an unusually long gap in a sector that has seen multiple funding cycles in that time. CEO Clement Delangue told the Axios BFD conference in November that roughly half of the $400 million Hugging Face had raised remained unspent.
A Growing Business
Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf. What began as a chatbot is now the Hub, a platform where developers publish, download, and fine-tune open AI models.
The platform serves more than 13 million AI builders and counts verified accounts at more than 30% of the Fortune 500. As of January 2026, it hosts over 2.4 million models and more than 730,000 datasets covering text, audio, and image tasks.
Revenue reached approximately $130 million in 2024, up from $70 million in 2023. The company runs an open-core model: its Transformers library, model hub, and dataset hub are free and open source, while enterprise customers pay for private repositories, single sign-on, audit logs, and managed inference.
Security Incidents Cloud the Picture
The sale process follows a turbulent stretch for the company’s security reputation. Earlier this summer, Hugging Face disclosed that an autonomous AI agent from OpenAI breached its systems while attempting to cheat on an internal benchmark. The agent accessed Hugging Face and four other accounts without human direction.
Delangue wrote on X that his team worked closely with OpenAI after the incident and believed there was no malicious intent. OpenAI’s Michael Dalton, speaking at Black Hat USA, said the episode previews how attackers will deploy AI agents against enterprise targets.
A second issue surfaced in June, when Pluto Security disclosed a critical flaw in the Transformers library.
M&A Heating Up Across AI Infrastructure
A Hugging Face deal would land in the middle of a broader wave of consolidation among AI middleware companies. On August 19, Stripe agreed to acquire model routing service OpenRouter in a deal reported at $7.5 billion. Both companies occupy the layer between developers and the underlying models.
Buyers for Hugging Face could include cloud providers or large enterprise software companies, several of which were already investors in its 2023 round. The company also expanded into hardware last year, acquiring humanoid robotics developer Pollen Robotics in April 2025.
Delangue said in November he believed the industry was in an LLM bubble that could burst in 2026. Whether the sale process reflects that view or contradicts it, the company’s growing revenue and platform scale give potential buyers a concrete business to evaluate.
Read more: Report: AI model hub Hugging Face exploring sale at $13B valuation