Hugging Face Valuation, Revenue, and Key Stats (2024)
Dave Ver Meer · Updated: May 2, 2024
Hugging Face is fast becoming the go-to place for open-source AI, with some referring to it as the open-source alternative to ChatGPT and the "GitHub of AI."
They have a library with a mind-boggling 120,000 pre-trained models and 20,000 datasets. And they raised $235 million in August, giving Hugging Face a fresh valuation of $4.5 billion.
In this article, you'll learn about the latest statistics, including recent valuation, funding, and revenue.
Contents
Let's get started.
Top Hugging Face stats and facts
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Hugging Face's most recent valuation is $4.5 billion, based on raising $235 million in their Series D funding round. That's more than double their previous valuation of 2 billion in 2022.
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In 2021, Hugging Face's revenue was $10 million and is now estimated to be $25-50 million.
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Hugging Face has raised a total of $396 million since being founded in 2016.
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Over 10,000 companies use Hugging Face's platform for machine learning and AI development.
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Hugging Face has over 120,000 pre-trained models, 20,000 datasets, and 50,000 demos covering use cases like computer vision, biology, speech, and reinforcement learning.
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HuggingChat currently has 30 billion parameters, compared to ChatGPT 3's 175 billion parameters and ChatGPT 4's estimated 1 trillion parameters.
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Hugging Face has over 1,000 paying customers, including Intel, Pfizer, Bloomberg, and eBay.
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StarCoder, Hugging Face's AI coding assistant, was trained on 80 programming languages and has 15 billion parameters.
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Google Cloud is teaming up with Hugging Face to let developers tap into Google Cloud's hardware and infrastructure.
Sources: Forbes, Similarweb, Hugging Face, SlashGear, Crunchbase, TechRadar, TechCrunch, VentureBeat
Hugging Face is currently valued at $4.5 billion
Hugging Face raised $235 million in 2023 from various investors, including tech heavyweights like Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, IBM, and Salesforce. That puts their most recent valuation at $4.5 billion, which is reported as being 100 times more than their annual revenue.
Investors believe that Hugging Face could be a $50-100 billion company if it ever goes public.
Further, in an interview with Forbes, their CEO Clément Delangue has been quoted saying:
"We want to be the first company to go public with an emoji, rather than a three-letter ticker. We have to start doing some lobbying to the Nasdaq to make sure it can happen."
Overview
| Headquarters | New York, New York |
|---|---|
| Founders | Clément Delangue (CEO), Julien Chaumond (CTO), and Thomas Wolf (CSO) |
| Founded | 2016 |
| Funded By | Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, IBM, and Salesforce |
| Funding Raised | $396 million |
| Valuation | $4.5 billion |
| Estimated Revenue | $25-50 million |
| Number of Users | 10,000+ companies |
| Website Traffic | 25 million |
| Technology and Data | 120,000 pre-trained models, 20,000 datasets, and GPT-2 |
| Services | Inference API, Autotrain, Hugging Face Hub (hosting) |
Traffic stats
The traffic to Hugging Face's website (huggingface.co) has been steady in recent months, receiving just over 18 million visitors in both December and November of last year.
Users spend an average of 4 minutes and 59 seconds on the site, which is only slightly less than the average of 5 minutes and 04 seconds that visitors stay on OpenAI (openai.com).
What's more, visitors view an average of 5.27 pages per visit and have a bounce rate of 48.24%.
Top marketing channels
About 4 in 10 visits (45.06%) are direct. The second biggest traffic contributor is from organic search (28.67%).
Here's a breakdown of the top marketing channels that drive traffic to Hugging Face.
| Rank | Channel | Traffic Share |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Direct | 45.06% |
| 2 | Organic Search | 28.67% |
| 3 | Referrals | 14.34% |
| 4 | Social | 10.81% |
| 5 | 1.1% | |
| 6 | Display | 0.03% |
| 7 | Paid Search | <0.01% |
Social media traffic
At 54%, YouTube is easily the largest source of social traffic for Hugging Face. OpenAI follows a similar trend, with YouTube also sending it the most social traffic (60%).
Here's a detailed breakdown of the other top social networks that send traffic.
| Rank | Social Network | Traffic Share |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | YouTube | 54% |
| 2 | 18.77% | |
| 3 | 15.57% | |
| 4 | 4.58% | |
| 5 | 2.03% | |
| - | Others | 5.05% |
Source: Similarweb
Demographic stats
Visitors to Hugging Face's website are made up of 73.44% male and 26.56% female. The largest age group is 25-34 year olds (36.62%), followed by 18-24 year olds (30.77%).
18-34 year olds make up over half of the traffic (67.39%) when combined.
| Ages | Traffic Share |
|---|---|
| 18-24 | 30.77% |
| 25-34 | 36.62% |
| 35-44 | 16.77% |
| 45-54 | 9.21% |
| 55-64 | 3.94% |
| 65+ | 2.69% |
Source: Similarweb
What is Hugging Face?
Hugging Face is an open-source AI platform and community that has over 120,000 pre-trained models and 20,000 datasets.
They want to make AI more accessible for everyone, and their pre-trained models cover a broad range of specialties, including computer vision, biology, and speech.
Some have referred to Hugging Face as the "Github of AI."
Last year, they started offering paid plans and services that are already used by over 1,000 companies. In April 2023, they released HuggingChat, their open-source generative AI, as a ChatGPT competitor.
Even though HuggingChat didn’t add 100 million in its first 60 days like ChatGPT did, it still has an important role to play in the adoption of open-source AI.
In their own words, their mission is:
"Our mission at Hugging Face is to make Machine Learning as friendly and as productive as possible, for beginners and experts alike."
How many users does Hugging Face have?
They have over 1,000 paying customers, including Intel, Pfizer, Bloomberg, and eBay.
Who funded Hugging Face?
Hugging Face has raised $396 million from 6 funding rounds, the first being in 2017 and the latest in 2023.
Who is the owner of Hugging Face?
How does Hugging Face make money?
Wrapping up
The stat that stood out the most to me is the massive library of 120,000 pre-trained models and 20,000 datasets they've already gathered. It'll be interesting to see if they can monetize them with their new paid features and plans.
The open-source sector of AI has been on fire so far this year, and by all signs, Hugging Face is just getting warmed up.
In fact, a leaked document from Google sums up the situation pretty well, with one of their senior software engineers writing:
"The uncomfortable truth is, we aren't positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI. While we've been squabbling, a third faction [open-source AI developers] has been quietly eating our lunch."