Bankers are shopping Hugging Face at triple the price it gave Nvidia

Hugging Face has been approached to sell itself at a valuation of $13 billion or more, reports say, but there is no deal yet.

The AI model-sharing platform has begun working with banks to review incoming bids.

Hugging Face waved off $500M to keep Nvidia out

Earlier this year, Hugging Face turned down a $500 million check from Nvidia, which would have valued the company at $7 billion.

The reason given then was governance. Hugging Face didn’t want a single large investor who could influence its decisions.

The reported asking valuation is around 2 times the rejected figure. Hugging Face’s last valuation came in 2023 when Salesforce Ventures led a round at a $4.5 billion post-money valuation.

Alphabet, GV, and IBM Ventures were also involved. To reach $13 billion would be to about triple that mark in about two years, with no new funding round in between to account for the jump.

Hugging Face is a lot like GitHub, but it hosts machine-learning models. It’s a place for developers and researchers to publish, discover, test, and run AI models.

… Continue reading the full article at the original source below.