Hugging Face is undertaking an effort to raise a total of $200 million in venture capital. Salesforce seems willing to respond to those plans with a hefty investment.
Salesforce is looking to get its hands on a large stake in Hugging Face, according to The Information. In this way, it hopes to gain input into the development of AI software.
The Salesforce’s portfolio was already extended with AI tools. Elaborations can be found in the AI Cloud and Einstein GPT, a parody of ChatGPT. As we can assume from the investments the company is willing to make in Hugging Face, AI has a whole future ahead and Salesforce wants to ensure itself a place in that future.
Opensource AI
Hugging Face manifests itself in Salesforce’s area of interest. The company maintains a platform suitable for running AI models on it. Only open-source models are allowed on the platform.
Also read: Hugging Face, GitHub, others fight to protect open-source in AI Act
The company is now reportedly looking for new capital. $200 million is reportedly being sought to double the company’s value to $4 billion.
Recent achievements
The AI platform provider recently concluded several partnerships with relevant names in the IT field. These collaborations show that Hugging Face is in the picture, so it has good momentum to launch the investment round.
A partnership with ServiceNow brought the large language model StarCoder. This LLM focuses on developers and serves for code generation.
Earlier this month, it added Nvidia to its list of partners. As a result, AI models from Hugging Face can be run directly on the Nvidia DGX Cloud supercomputing platform.