Hugging Face acquires Pollen Robotics

Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics, a French robotics company founded in 2016 by former Inria researchers Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet, extending the platform’s open-source model beyond software and into hardware. It was Hugging Face’s fifth acquisition, following Gradio and XetHub, but its first in robotics.

Pollen’s main product, the Reachy 2 humanoid, features 7-degree-of-freedom arms built around the company’s own “Orbita” joint mechanism, a mobile base with omniwheel drive and LiDAR, and VR teleoperation support; it was listed for $70,000 and had been adopted for research by institutions including Cornell and Carnegie Mellon. Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf framed the deal as extending the company’s existing robotics push: it had launched LeRobot, an open-source robotics library, in 2024, and the acquisition folded Pollen’s hardware and its open designs into that effort. “Robotics could be the next frontier unlocked by AI,” Wolf said, “and it should be open, affordable, and private.”

The acquisition fit a pattern of 2025 attention shifting toward embodied AI and humanoid robotics as a follow-on market to large language models, and tested whether the open-weights strategy that had built Hugging Face’s position in software — freely publishing model weights, code and now hardware designs — could be replicated in a much more capital-intensive category where companies like Figure AI and Tesla were pursuing closed, vertically integrated approaches instead.