Hugging Face

Hugging Face is an AI company founded in 2016 that has become the GitHub of machine learning. The platform hosts over 500,000 models, 250,000 datasets, and 100,000 AI applications, making it the largest open source AI community in the world. Hugging Face created the Transformers library which is the most popular machine learning library with over 100 million downloads. The company has raised over $395 million in funding at a $4.5 billion valuation from investors including Sequoia, Coatue, and Google. Hugging Face is headquartered in New York with approximately 250 employees distributed globally. The company offers Hugging Face Hub for hosting models, Inference Endpoints for deployment, and AutoTrain for no-code model training. Major customers include Bloomberg, Intel, and Grammarly. Hugging Face is considered essential infrastructure for the open source AI ecosystem and competes with proprietary platforms from OpenAI and Anthropic.