Hugging Face, Inc.

Open-Source Artificial Intelligence PlatformFounded 2016- HQ today: New York, New York, United States

Founders

Who Founded Hugging Face?

Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, Thomas Wolf · Founded 2016 · HQ today: New York, New York, United States

Who founded Hugging Face?

Hugging Face was founded by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, Thomas Wolf in 2016. It is now led by Clément Delangue.

Founders: Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, Thomas Wolf
Founded: 2016
Headquarters: New York, New York, United States
Number of founders: 3
Current CEO: Clément Delangue (since 2016)

Where was Hugging Face founded?: Hugging Face was founded in New York, New York in 2016.
When was Hugging Face founded?: Hugging Face was founded in 2016.
Who started Hugging Face?: Hugging Face was founded by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf.
How old is Hugging Face?: Hugging Face is 10 years old as of 2026.

Founding Story

Delangue, Chaumond, and Wolf launched Hugging Face in 2016 as an iPhone chatbot for teenagers, a friendly AI you could text, backed by a $1.2 million seed round from Betaworks, SV Angel, and Kevin Durant, among others. To make the bot work they built natural language tools and began open-sourcing them. When Google released BERT in TensorFlow in late 2018, Thomas Wolf published a PyTorch version, pytorch-pretrained-bert. It spread quickly through the research community, was renamed pytorch-transformers and then Transformers, and by 2019 the founders had dropped the app to focus on open-source machine learning.

Clément Delangue

Background

French entrepreneur and ESCP Europe graduate who worked in product and marketing roles at startups, including Moodstocks (later acquired by Google), before co-founding Hugging Face.

Role at Hugging Face, Inc.

Clément Delangue is co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face. He led the company from its 2016 teen chatbot app to the open-source pivot and became one of the most visible advocates for open AI, including testimony to the US House Science Committee in June 2023. He raised the company's Series A through D rounds and, in summer 2026, approached Nvidia about a sale, leading to the $12.93 billion agreement announced in September 2026. Clément Delangue was born in 1989.

Julien Chaumond

Background

Engineer educated at École Polytechnique and Stanford University with a background in software engineering and startups before co-founding Hugging Face.

Role at Hugging Face, Inc.

Julien Chaumond is co-founder and CTO of Hugging Face. He leads the engineering behind the Hub, the platform that stores and serves millions of model repositories and billions of downloads, and its developer-facing products. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Thomas Wolf

Background

Physicist with a PhD from Sorbonne University (Pierre and Marie Curie) who worked as a European patent attorney before moving into machine learning.

Role at Hugging Face, Inc.

Thomas Wolf is co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face. He wrote the 2018 PyTorch port of BERT that became the Transformers library, co-led the BigScience workshop that produced the 176B-parameter BLOOM model in 2022, and oversees the company's open science work, including its small model and robotics research. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Hugging Face, Inc.: CEO & Leadership History

Full timeline →

Clément Delangue

Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder

2016 – Present

Led the 2018-2019 pivot from chatbot to open-source ML, raised about $400M through the 2023 Series D, and negotiated the $12.93B Nvidia acquisition agreed in September 2026.

Julien Chaumond

Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder

2016 – Present

As CTO, he built the technical infrastructure that allowed the platform to host hundreds of thousands of AI models and datasets, creating the definitive 'GitHub of machine learning'.

Thomas Wolf

Chief Science Officer & Co-Founder

2016 – Present

He oversaw the massive open-science collaborative project BigScience, which successfully trained and released the BLOOM language model to democratize AI research.

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Who Founded Hugging Face? FAQ

Who founded Hugging Face and what was their founding vision?

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf. Their founding vision was to explore the frontiers of conversational natural language processing and make artificial intelligence accessible, creative, and collaborative.

Where did the founders get the idea for the company name and the hugging-face emoji logo?

The founders chose the hugging-face emoji () and the name Hugging Face to make artificial intelligence feel friendly, approachable, fun, and human, standing in deliberate contrast to the cold, intimidating branding of traditional enterprise tech corporations.

What initial angel and seed investments did the founders raise in 2016 to 2017?

Hugging Face raised an initial seed round of $1.2 million in 2017 from angel investors including Betaworks, SV Angel, and prominent tech figures, followed by a $4 million round in 2018 to fund their early conversational NLP research.

How did the founders build the world's most popular open-source AI community?

The founders prioritized developer happiness above all else: writing exceptionally clean Python code, providing comprehensive documentation and tutorials, responding directly to GitHub issues, and creating a welcoming, inclusive space for AI enthusiasts of all skill levels.

What was the founding ethos behind the 'Datasets' and 'Evaluate' libraries created by the founders?

The founders recognized that models are only as good as the data they are trained on. They built the open-source 'Datasets' library to provide instant, one-line access to thousands of curated public datasets with zero-copy memory mapping for fast loading.

What public roles have the founders taken on outside the company?

Clément Delangue testified before the US House Science Committee on open-source AI in June 2023, and Thomas Wolf co-led the BigScience research workshop of more than 1,000 researchers that trained BLOOM.

How did the founders maintain an open-source culture despite raising hundreds of millions in venture capital?

The founders structured their commercial offerings around hosted compute, security, and enterprise collaboration, ensuring that all fundamental algorithms, model architectures, and core libraries remain 100% free Apache-2.0 or MIT open-source software.

What long-term impact do the founders envision Hugging Face having on science and humanity?

The founders believe open-source AI is essential for human knowledge and democratic agency, aiming to ensure that the scientific breakthroughs of AI remain an open public good accessible to every student, scientist, and builder worldwide.

Who founded Hugging Face?

It was founded by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf. Thomas Wolf (Chief Science Officer) is a highly respected legend in the AI research community. Under his technical leadership, the team built the massively popular "Transformers" open-source library, which standardized how researchers interact with complex AI architectures, sparking a massive revolution.

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Who founded Hugging Face?

Founding Story

Clément Delangue

Background

Role at Hugging Face, Inc.

Julien Chaumond

Background

Role at Hugging Face, Inc.

Thomas Wolf

Background

Role at Hugging Face, Inc.

Hugging Face, Inc.: CEO & Leadership History

Compare Hugging Face, Inc. Leadership With Competitors

Keep researching Hugging Face

Who Founded Hugging Face? FAQ

Who founded Hugging Face and what was their founding vision?

Where did the founders get the idea for the company name and the hugging-face emoji logo?

What initial angel and seed investments did the founders raise in 2016 to 2017?

How did the founders build the world's most popular open-source AI community?

What was the founding ethos behind the 'Datasets' and 'Evaluate' libraries created by the founders?

What public roles have the founders taken on outside the company?

How did the founders maintain an open-source culture despite raising hundreds of millions in venture capital?

What long-term impact do the founders envision Hugging Face having on science and humanity?

Who founded Hugging Face?

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