Hugging Face reportedly in talks to sell for $13B or more

Hugging Face has been approached to sell at a valuation of $13 billion or more, Business Insider reported over the weekend. The startup’s platform and open-source community is where developers and researchers share, find, test, and deploy AI models. It’s not clear who Hugging Face has been in talks with, and no deal has yet been reached, according to Business Insider, though the startup has reportedly been talking to banks to help evaluate bids.

The talks come amid rising interest in companies providing core AI infrastructure, as shown by Stripe’s $7 billion acquisition of OpenRouter. Hugging Face last raised in 2023 at a $4.5 billion post-money valuation, in a round led by Salesforce Ventures with participation from Alphabet, GV, IBM Ventures, and others. It was also recently the target of an attack from one of OpenAI’s systems, which broke out of its sandbox during a cybersecurity evaluation and breached the startup’s servers.

On a recent episode of the TechCrunch Equity podcast, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said the company was “close to profitability” and had only “recently started to touch the money that [it] raised three years ago,” adding that it’s focused on “long-term sustainability of the company rather than short-term profits or fundraising maximization.” How Delangue has framed the company’s responsibility to its community raises questions over whether Hugging Face is genuinely weighing a sale or simply fielding offers: “We’re building a platform for the community, and they’re trusting us with sharing their data and their models on the platform, so we have a long-term responsibility to them,” he said on Equity. Earlier this year, the company turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia that would have valued it at $7 billion, saying it didn’t want a single dominant investor swaying its decisions. TechCrunch has reached out to Hugging Face for more information.

Why it matters

A $13 billion-plus valuation would nearly double where Nvidia’s rejected offer placed Hugging Face just months earlier, underscoring how fast prices for AI infrastructure platforms are rising even as the company’s own leadership signals it isn’t chasing a sale.