As first reported by The Information, then seemingly verified by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on X (formerly known as Twitter), AI startup Hugging Face has raised $235 million in a Series D funding round.
The tranche, which had participation from Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, Salesforce and Sound Ventures, values Hugging Face at $4.5 billion. That’s double the startup’s valuation from May 2022 and reportedly more than 100 times Hugging Face’s annualized revenue, reflecting the enormous appetite for AI and platforms to support its development.
Hugging Face has raised a total of $395.2 million to date, placing it among the better-funded AI startups in the space. Those ahead of it are OpenAI ($11.3 billion), Anthropic ($1.6 billion), Inflection AI ($1.5 billion), Cohere ($435 million) and Adept ($415 million).
“AI is the new way of building all software. It’s the most important paradigm shift of the decade and, compared to the software shift,