AI startup Hugging Face has secured $235 million ​​at a $4.5 billion valuation in a Series D funding round, initially revealed by The Information and seemingly confirmed by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on X (formerly known as Twitter).

The funding round received contributions from major players including Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM, and Qualcomm, as announced by the company. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue stated that the raised funds will primarily be allocated towards talent acquisition to enhance competitiveness in the field of artificial intelligence.

Established in 2016, Hugging Face had secured a cumulative funding of $160 million before the latest investment, including its most recent series C round of $100 million announced in 2022.

Hugging Face operates a platform that enables AI developers to collaborate on code, models, and data sets, utilizing the company’s developer tools to simplify the deployment of open-source AI models. One of its key offerings involves hosting weights, essential components of contemporary AI models, consisting of large numeric lists.

According to Delangue, AI developers are utilizing Hugging Face continuously throughout the day. He anticipates a significant rise in the count of software developers engaging with AI models in the upcoming years. 

“Maybe in five years, you’re going to have like 100 million AI builders. And if all of them use Hugging Face all day, every day, we’ll obviously be in a good position,” he said.

Hugging Face also  recently introduced GPT- styled multimodal IDEFICS (Image-aware Decoder Enhanced à la Flamingo with Interleaved Cross-attentionS), an open-access visual language model which accepts arbitrary sequences of images and texts and produces text.

Thanks to the new funding, Delangue mentioned that Hugging Face intends to focus more on supporting different areas like research, business, and startups. The company, which currently has 170 employees, also plans to hire more people in the next few months.