Hugging Face’s co-founders just landed a big sale to Nvidia. But how big, exactly, is it?
Three French founders just hit a major payday.
Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf launched the AI company Hugging Face in 2016. Now, a decade later, that venture has reached a deal to be acquired by computer chip powerhouse Nvidia—and the price tag on the sale, $12.93 billion, almost certainly exceeds what the trio first thought possible.
It’s not clear exactly how much of an equity stake the founders had in Hugging Face at the time of the M&A agreement, but it’s probably quite impressive. (LinkedIn indicates that all three are still involved in running Hugging Face.) One estimate, from the market data platform Dealroom.co, pegs the three co-founders’ equity share at 28 percent total, or about $3.62 billion under the post-Nvidia valuation. If their holdings are split evenly, that would mean each founder will have a roughly $1.2 billion stake if the deal closes.
Initially a chatbot app, New York City-based Hugging
Initially a chatbot app, New York City-based Hugging Face has since evolved into a popular repository for open-se founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, has himself been an advocate for open- direct line to a community of AI developers and hobbyists whose software often runs on Nvidia chips
The daily digest for entrepreneurs and business leaders
An Inc.com Featured Presentation
Hugging Face “will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said in the wake of the agreement.
Rumors of a roughly $13 billion deal started bubbling up in late August—a sizable increase over the $4.5 billion valuation the company secured in 2023. The Guardianframed Nvidia’s purchase as an indication that the publicly traded hardware giant is betting “support for open AI models could offset a potential slowdown in demand for the semiconductor giant’s chips.”
Per The Guardian, the deal specifics would see Nvidia pay just under $12 billion to Hugging Face investors, and put up to another $1 billion toward “an equity-based retention program … for employees who join Nvidia.”
Source: www.inc.com
