Jeff Boudier, Chief Executive Officer of How to Make Money Eloquent Face Doesn’t Chase Money

Hugging Face, an AI startup known for its GitHub-like hosting space used by millions of developers and businesses, is pushing back against Silicon Valley’s fervor for relentless fundraising and overgrowth. The New York City-based company, which hasn’t raised venture capital in more than two years, is in no rush to seek new funding or pursue more lucrative opportunities such as advertising, said Jeff Boudier, the company’s chief financial officer.

“In a funny way, we’re taking the opposite approach,” Boudier, who has led product and growth at Hugging Face since 2020, told the Observer. “We’re not famous for making money. We’re famous for making AI accessible and easy to use.”

Formerly GoPro’s chief business development officer, Boudier joined Hugging Face as its first “business-oriented” employee, in his words, tasked with building the company’s business model. In the five years of his management, Hugging Face is now profitable or making investments, depending on the quarter, he said.

Hugging Face was founded ten years ago by French entrepreneurs Clément Delanggue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. It started out as a chatbot but later gained prominence as a platform where researchers and developers share models and datasets, with an emphasis on open source code. Its offerings go beyond major language models to include speech, image and video. Today, the platform hosts 2.5 million models, 700,000 datasets and has 13 million users worldwide.

Hugging Face hasn’t raised money in over two years. Its last round, a $235 million Series D in 2023, valued the company at $4.5 billion — an amount that was impressive at the time but modest by today’s AI standards. Last year, the company reportedly rejected a $500 million investment from Nvidia, according to the Financial Times. The publication reported that Hugging Face turned down the offer to avoid taking on one prominent investor. Boudier said the company still has cash in the bank from the 2023 round and that funding is not a “priority” right now. Instead, he is focused on building a financially sustainable platform.

How does Hugging Face make money?

Hugging Face uses a “freemium” business model, where most users access its services for free and a small portion—about 3 percent to 5 percent of users—pays for advanced use or business partnerships, Boudier said. Paying customers include major technology players such as Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, OpenAI and Anthropic.

In recent months, Hugging Face has also tried a new, albeit small, way to make money: robots. Late last year, it began shipping the Reachy Mini, a small, desktop-sized robot that starts at $299 and allows users to test various AI applications. More than 5,000 units have been sold. The robot made an appearance during Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s CES in January to demonstrate the capabilities of Nvidia’s models. “It’s a successful experiment, and we’re looking to scale it this year,” Boudier said.

Hugging Face is investing heavily in robotics, betting that demand for on-device AI will continue to rise, Boudier noted. Production of the Reachy Mini was made possible by Hugging Face’s acquisition of Pollen Robotics, a developer of open source humanoid robots, in 2025. Last year, Hugging Face launched the LeRobot library, which targets software for robotics applications.

“No” to ads in chatbots

In-app advertising has sparked debate in the AI ​​community in recent weeks. OpenAI recently started introducing ads to ChatGPT. This move was abandoned by rival Anthropic. Hugging Faces faced the same question but decided to remain non-advertising. A few years ago, Hugging Face was approached by ad networks interested in integrating ads into its chat app, Hugging Chat.

“We did not consider these proposals at all,” said Boudier. “In my opinion, it was completely out of whack with what we’re trying to do and our values ​​and business model.”

Boudier said the introduction of ads would make it difficult to balance between users and AI tools. “It’s exciting to see how it plays out.”