Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at the moment confirmed on X (Twitter) that the corporate’s enterprise arm will lead a brand new funding spherical for open-source AI firm Hugging Face.
Hugging Face has but to announce the funding spherical and Benioff didn’t disclose on the funding dimension. Nonetheless, The Info’s report means that the startup is predicted to safe roughly $200 million from the brand new funding spherical, citing individuals acquainted with the matter. The anticipated funding will place Hugging Face’s valuation at over $4 billion, which is greater than 100 occasions its yearly income of $40 million.
In July, Forbes reported Hugging Face’s efforts to lift new funds and that Sound Ventures, Ashton Kutcher’s enterprise capital agency, was positioned to take the lead within the Sequence D spherical.
In Might 2022, Hugging Face introduced that it had raised $100 million in Sequence C funding led by Lux Capital with main participation from Sequoia, Coatue and others. The spherical valued the corporate at $2 billion regardless of producing lower than $10 million in income the yr earlier than.
Insider sources knowledgeable Forbes that Clément Delangue, Hugging Face co-founder and CEO, was actively contemplating funding proposals from different potential buyers.
Hugging Face gives AI compute entry at a price, commencing from $9 monthly for Professional accounts and $20 monthly for enterprises.
The startup asserts its standing because the fastest-growing group and the most-utilized machine studying platform. It boasts an extra of 100,000 pre-trained fashions and 10,000 hosted datasets. These embody a broad spectrum of fields comparable to NLP, pc imaginative and prescient, speech, time-series evaluation, biology, reinforcement studying, and chemistry.
The AI Startup Funding Race
The financing signifies an ongoing frenzy surrounding promising AI startups. In June, Inflection AI raised $1.3 billion, to additional develop its proprietary chatbot Pi. In the identical month, pure language processing platform Cohere raised $270 million.
Salesforce additionally invested in Anthropic’s $450 million Sequence C spherical in Might, valuing the corporate at near $5 billion, per a Reuters report.
Likewise, OpenAI made waves by finishing a $300 million share sale in April, adopted by elevating $175 million for a startup help fund a month later, as detailed in official filings.
Moreover, Adept reached unicorn standing after a profitable $350 million fundraise in March.
With a valuation poised to exceed $4 billion, Hugging Face can be coming into the ranks as one of many prime three highest-valued AI startups, standing on par with Inflection AI and trailing simply behind Anthropic. Just lately, Anthropic additionally acquired a further $100 million from South Korea’s SK Telecom, following its $450 million Sequence C.
