Hugging Face becomes the first STATION F Alumni to hit unicorn status

Approaching five years old, STATION F now counts its first unicorn among its alumni companies. Hugging Face, which joined STATION F in 2017, announced today a $100M raise with Lux Capital, Sequoia Capital and Coatue Management investing for the first time, and other existing investors including Addition, Betaworks, AIX Ventures, Cygni Capital, Kevin Durant and Olivier Pomel. With this fundraising, Hugging Face reaches a $2billion valuation, hitting the unicorn status.

Former member of Ubisoft, Microsoft and Naver programs at STATION F, Hugging Face is an open-source community-driven platform offering machine learning models allowing developers to discover and collaborate on machine learning models, datasets and machine learning apps. Hugging Face is used by 10.000 companies.

“We joined STATION F as a 4-people team at the very opening of STATION F, back in 2017. We were incubated first by Microsoft, then Ubisoft, then Naver – basically we tried them all.

STATION F was super helpful and the creativity/convenience of being able to work together from the same location as so many talented teams in the early days was awesome. STATION F is like the lighthouse of creativity and talent in Paris and in Europe”, says Julien Chaumond, co-founder of Hugging Face.

“Thanks to the new funding, we’ll be doubling down on research, open-source, products and responsible democratization of AI”, explains the company. During the past 12 months, the Hugging Face team has grown from 30 to 120+ people and the company is still “hiring for every position you can think of for every level of seniority”.

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