Hugging Face, Inc.
Acquisitions
4
Major Deals Covered
This page covers 4 major deals from 2021 to 2025, each with its price where disclosed and the reason behind it.
| Company | Year | Price | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gradio | 2021 | Undisclosed | Acquired the open-source Python library for building web interfaces for machine learning models. |
| Argilla | 2024 | Undisclosed | Acquired the Spanish open-source data curation and annotation platform. |
| XetHub | 2024 | Undisclosed | Acquired the Seattle startup's chunk-based storage technology for very large files and repositories. |
| Pollen Robotics | 2025 | Undisclosed | Acquired the French maker of the open-source Reachy humanoid robot, Hugging Face's first move into hardware. |
2025
Acquired the French maker of the open-source Reachy humanoid robot, Hugging Face's first move into hardware.
Paired robot hardware with the LeRobot software library; led to the Reachy Mini launch in July 2025.
Price undisclosed; team joined Hugging Face's robotics group.
2024
Acquired the Spanish open-source data curation and annotation platform.
Added tools for building and labeling fine-tuning and preference datasets on the Hub.
Integrated into Hugging Face's dataset tooling.
2024
Acquired the Seattle startup's chunk-based storage technology for very large files and repositories.
Hub storage began moving from Git LFS to Xet, speeding uploads and downloads of large models.
Xet storage rolled out across the Hub.
2021
Acquired the open-source Python library for building web interfaces for machine learning models.
Gradio became the most common framework for Hugging Face Spaces demos.
Integrated into Hugging Face; still developed as open source.
Hugging Face grows by being the first place open models land and then selling the tools to use them. Recent moves include buying Argilla (data curation) and XetHub (large-file storage) in 2024, buying humanoid robot maker Pollen Robotics in April 2025 and launching the low-cost Reachy Mini robot in July 2025, publishing its own small open models (SmolLM, SmolVLM), and routing Hub users to third-party inference providers. The Nvidia agreement is meant to give the platform more compute and distribution than it could fund alone.
Hugging Face gives away its core platform and libraries and charges for the things companies need once they put open models into production. Public model and dataset hosting is free. Revenue comes from Team and Enterprise Hub subscriptions (private repositories, SSO, audit logs, access controls, storage regions), usage-billed compute such as Inference Endpoints and GPU upgrades for Spaces, PRO accounts for individuals, and custom enterprise and cloud-partner agreements with AWS, Google Cloud, and others. The free Hub is the acquisition funnel: developers find models there, then their employers pay to run and govern them privately.
In December 2021, Hugging Face acquired Gradio, an open-source Python library founded by Abubakar Abid that allows developers to quickly create customizable web interfaces for machine learning models. Gradio became the foundational engine powering hundreds of thousands of Hugging Face Spaces.
In June 2024 Hugging Face acquired Argilla, a Spanish open-source data curation and annotation platform, to help users build and label fine-tuning and preference datasets on the Hub. The price was not officially disclosed.
In August 2024 Hugging Face acquired Seattle-based XetHub, whose chunk-based storage handles very large files more efficiently than Git LFS. Hugging Face has since moved Hub storage to Xet.
In April 2025 Hugging Face acquired French startup Pollen Robotics, maker of the Reachy 2 humanoid, for an undisclosed price. It was the company's first move into hardware and pairs robots with its LeRobot open-source software. The Reachy Mini desktop robot followed in July 2025.
Hugging Face targets open-source tools that have passionate organic developer adoption, solve critical bottlenecks in the machine learning lifecycle (data labeling, interactive UI, model serving, quantization), and share its core commitment to open science.
Hugging Face preserves the open-source nature of acquired projects, keeping their GitHub repositories public and active while providing acquired engineering teams with resources to scale their tools for millions of global Hub users.
Yes. Nvidia agreed on September 2, 2026 to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. The deal needs regulatory approval and is expected to close in the first half of 2027.
Its deals so far cover demo tooling (Gradio), data curation (Argilla), large-file storage (XetHub), and robotics hardware (Pollen Robotics), each filling a gap in the open ML workflow.
In 2021, Hugging Face executed a massive, highly strategic acquisition by buying Gradio (a wildly popular open-source tool that allows developers to easily build web interfaces for their AI models in just a few lines of Python). By integrating Gradio, Hugging Face allowed millions of users to physically interact with and test AI models directly inside their web browser.
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