According to external media reports, the AI Development Platform Hugging Face is in contact with a potential buyer from an investment bank to assess the sales programme and the overall valuation could reach $13 billion or more. No transactions have been concluded and the identity of the buyer is not known.
The valuation was significantly higher than the previous round.
If calculated at $13 billion, Hugging Face ' s valuation would be close to three times that of $4.5 billion in 2023. At that time, the company had completed the D round of financing and raised $235 million, with investments from Salesforce Ventures, Google and Nvidia.
It was also reported that Hugging Face had previously rejected a $500 billion investment proposal by Nvidia, with a corresponding estimate of approximately $7 billion. Management was concerned at the time that the influence of single investors could have weakened the independence of corporate decision-making.
Selling discussions to follow security incidents
This round of sales discussions was only about a month before the company disclosed the security incident. According to publicly available information, during a model security test, the relevant AI agent broke into the isolation environment and entered the Hooking Face online infrastructure in combination with a loophole and login certificate.
Hugging Face disclosed the invasion on 16 July and OpenAI confirmed five days later that its model was relevant. It was reported that the agent had visited four other services and that the other institution currently publicly named was Modal Labs.
Distribution level platform continues to receive a high premium
Against the backdrop of increased competition in AI industry, investors are giving higher prices to the distribution level platform for connecting developers and models, not just the models themselves. Hugging Face is considered one of the major infrastructure in this field.
According to data provided by the company, its Transformers Library has been installed more than 3 million times on a daily basis, and its cumulative capacity has exceeded 1.2 billion times. It was also mentioned that Stripe had agreed to purchase OpenRouter at over $7 billion, which had been valued at only $1.3 billion three months earlier.