Hugging Face raises $235 million Series D at a $4.5 billion valuation

Hugging Face raised $235 million in a Series D round led by Salesforce Ventures, at a valuation reported as $4.5 billion — more than double the $2 billion it had commanded fifteen months earlier at its Series C. Google, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, IBM, Qualcomm and Sound Ventures all joined as investors, alongside existing backers, making the round notable less for its size than for the breadth of large technology companies that bought in simultaneously.

Co-founder and chief executive Clement Delangue said the funding would go toward growing the roughly 170-person team and continuing to invest in open-source tools, research and support for enterprises and start-ups building on the platform. Unlike a typical strategic round with one or two corporate backers, this one drew in effectively every major chipmaker and cloud provider — companies that in other contexts competed directly with each other — as investors in the same open infrastructure layer.

The round reflected Hugging Face’s position as the default distribution hub for open-weight models at a moment when demand for AI infrastructure was rising sharply across the industry: hosting a company that sat underneath, rather than competing against, most of the frontier labs and hardware vendors gave each investor a stake in a piece of shared infrastructure rather than in a rival’s proprietary model. It cemented Hugging Face’s role as the open-source counterweight to closed-model labs through the build-out that followed.