Hugging Face 🤗 has closed a brand new spherical of funding. It’s a $100 million Sequence C spherical with an enormous valuation. Following immediately’s funding spherical, Hugging Face is now price $2 billion.
Lux Capital is main the spherical, with Sequoia and Coatue investing within the firm for the primary time. A number of the startup’s present traders participated as soon as once more. These traders embody Addition, Betaworks, AIX Ventures, Cygni Capital, Kevin Durant and Olivier Pomel.
Regardless of a brief life, Hugging Face has had an fascinating evolution. Once I first covered the corporate in 2017, the startup was targeted on a shopper app. It seemed like one more messaging app. And but, there was nobody on the opposite aspect of the dialog because it was a chatbot app for bored youngsters.
That shopper guess hasn’t paid off, however the firm stored iterating on its pure language processing know-how. Hugging Face launched the Transformers library on GitHub and immediately attracted a ton of consideration — it at present has 62,000 stars and 14,000 forks on the platform.
With Transformers, you possibly can leverage well-liked NLP fashions, equivalent to BERT, GPT-2, T5 or DistilBERT and use these fashions to govern textual content in a method or one other. As an example, you possibly can classify textual content, extract data, routinely reply questions, summarize textual content, generate textual content, and so on.
Because of the success of this libary, Hugging Face rapidly turned the principle repository for all issues associated to machine studying fashions — not simply pure language processing. On the corporate’s website, you possibly can browse 1000’s of pre-trained machine-learning fashions, take part within the developer group with your personal mannequin, obtain datasets and extra.
Basically, Hugging Face is constructing the GitHub of machine studying. It’s a community-driven platform with a ton of repositories. Builders can create, uncover and collaborate on ML fashions, datasets and ML apps.
Hugging Face additionally provides hosted companies, such because the Inference API that permits you to use 1000’s of fashions through a programming interface, and the flexibility to “AutoTrain” your mannequin.
With immediately’s funding spherical, the corporate plans to do extra of the identical. 10,000 firms are actually utilizing Hugging Face in a method or one other, so it’s not time to pivot once more.
