Hugging Face: The GitHub of Machine Learning
Hugging Face, founded in Paris in 2016 by Clément Delangue and Julien Chaumond, has become the world’s most important AI platform infrastructure company at a $4.5 billion valuation. Often called “the GitHub of machine learning,” it hosts 450,000+ models, 100,000+ datasets, and 150,000+ demo spaces.
Platform Dominance
Hugging Face Hub is where the global AI community shares, discovers, and deploys models. Every major AI lab — Meta, Google, Microsoft, Mistral, Stability AI — publishes on Hugging Face. The Transformers library has 130,000+ GitHub stars and is the most-used ML framework in production. Monthly active developers exceed 1 million.
Business Model
Enterprise Hub: Private model hosting, access controls, and compliance features for enterprise clients. Inference API: Pay-per-call model serving. AutoTrain: No-code model fine-tuning. Enterprise contracts with companies including Intel, Bloomberg, Grammarly generate growing SaaS revenue alongside the open-source platform.
Why It’s French
Despite HQ relocating to New York for US enterprise sales, Hugging Face maintains a major Paris R&D center and its founding team remains deeply connected to the French AI ecosystem. The company benefits from France’s 30% R&D tax credit on Paris-based engineering and research activities, and has received Bpifrance support.