Three French founders of the artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face have emerged as billionaires after a deal with Nvidia Corp. Nvidia agreed to buy the startup, which began in 2016 in Paris, in a transaction valued at roughly $13 billion.
Net worth of $1.8 billion
Clement “Clem” Delangue, 38, Julien Chaumond, 42, and Thomas Wolf, 41, will each have a net worth of about $1.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which valued their fortunes for the first time.
A spokesperson for Brooklyn-based didn’t respond to requests for comment about the founders’ wealth.
The Hugging Face trio join the three founders of Paris-based Mistral AI as French nationals who have become billionaires through their stakes in AI and computing companies.
Also included in the cohort are Olivier Pomel and Alexis Le-Quoc, founders of New York-based Datadog Inc, Bloomberg reported.
The co-founder started their company a decade ago, choosing Hugging Face as a “temporary” name, and later joined billionaire Xavier Niel’s startup campus Station F, located in a redeveloped, century-old freight station in Paris.
In a post on LinkedIn ahead of the deal announcement, Station F said the three first arrived in 2017 to develop a chatbot for teenagers, then pivoted, began raising money, and were set to become a “titan of an exit.”
Who is Clement “Clem” Delangue?
Clément Delangue is the CEO and co-founder of Hugging Face, an open and collaborative platform for AI builders.
With a background in entrepreneurship and education from Stanford University, Delangue has played a pivotal role in growing Hugging Face into a leading AI platform, hosting over a million open-source repositories and serving more than 15,000 companies integrating AI into their products and workflows.
His first startup experience was with Moodstocks, a developer of machine-learning based on image recognition technology, that was bought by Google, according to his LinkedIn profile.
He attended universities in Madrid, Dublin and Bangalore (IIM) before going to a French business school and taking an online introduction to computer science course at Stanford University, where co-founder Chaumond had completed some of his studies.
Who is Julien Chaumond?
Julien Chaumond is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Hugging Face.
At Hugging Face, Julien has been pivotal in developing widely-used machine learning libraries, such as the Transformers Library, and has played a significant role in making large language models accessible and efficient for production use.
His contributions extend to the open-source community, where he has been involved in initiatives like the BigScience project, which focuses on creating large, multilingual language models through collaborative efforts.
Julien Chaumond’s educational journey is marked by a strong foundation in engineering and computer science. He began his academic career at Lycée Hoche, where he served as a Teaching Assistant from September 2004 to March 2005.
He then pursued a Diplôme d’Ingénieur (M.Sc.) in Applied Mathematics at École Polytechnique from 2003 to 2006, followed by another Diplôme d’Ingénieur (M.Sc.) in Computer Science at Télécom Paris in 2006.
Julien furthered his studies at Stanford University, earning a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science between 2006 and 2007. During his time at Stanford, he also worked as a Research Assistant from March 2007 to May 2008, gaining valuable research experience that would later inform his professional endeavors.
Who is Thomas Wolf?
Thomas Wolf is co-founder and Chief Science Officer (CSO) of Hugging Face, where he has been at the inception of the open-source, open-science and robotics efforts.
Wolf graduated from École Polytechnique, researched laser-plasma interactions at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and completed a doctorate in statistical and quantum physics at Sorbonne University and ESPCI.
After earning a law degree at Pantheon Sorbonne University, he worked in intellectual-property law at Cabinet Plasseraud, advising companies on patent portfolios. Work with machine-learning startups revived his interest in research, leading him to build Hugging Face with Clément Delangue and Julien Chaumond.
The $12.93 billion deal
Computer chip company is buying artificial intelligence software platform Hugging Face for.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote in a blog post Thursday that more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 data sets and 1 million applications. There are also more than 200,000 companies that use the platform, he said.
The deal — expected to close in the first half of 2027 — marks the biggest move yet by to broaden the uptake of AI and extend his customer range.
It’s also a big test for Hugging Face, which has long backed keeping the industry open and decentralized, boasting it’s “on a mission to democratize good machine learning” and describing itself as being like an AI library.
“I am honored that Clem came to me as he considered the next chapter of Hugging Face and believed Nvidia would be a great home for the company,” Huang said in a blog post announcing the deal.
Hugging Face operates a platform for sharing AI models that can be used freely by others. It was at the centre of a cybersecurity incident this year when it was inadvertently hacked by a model being tested by OpenAI.
Under the deal unveiled Thursday, Nvidia pledged Hugging Face will remain an open platform, with users able to upload and download AI models and datasets of their choosing. The co-founders will remain at the company under a six-year retention agreement, Wolf said in an interview on Bloomberg TV.
(With inputs from Bloomberg)