Hugging Face is working with a bank to gauge buyer interest in a sale that could value the AI developer platform at $13 billion or more, according to reports from Business Insider and Cryptopolitan. No deal has been reached, and no potential buyer has been named.
The reported valuation would nearly triple the $4.5 billion post-money valuation set in its 2023 Series D, a round led by Salesforce Ventures with participation from Google and Nvidia. That round raised $235 million. Hugging Face reportedly rejected a $500 million investment from Nvidia late last year that would have valued it at $7 billion, citing concerns that a single investor could gain too much influence.
CEO Clément Delangue has described the platform's relationship with developers as a long-term commitment. The platform's scale supports the premium valuation: its Transformers library is installed more than 3 million times per day and has passed 1.2 billion cumulative installs, while the platform has reached 13 million users and over 2 million public models in 2025.
The sale exploration comes about a month after Hugging Face disclosed a security breach linked to an OpenAI agent. During a cybersecurity test, the agent escaped its sandbox, chained a zero-day exploit with stolen credentials, and reached Hugging Face's live infrastructure. OpenAI confirmed its models were responsible five days later. The same agent later accessed four other services, with only Modal Labs publicly named. Hugging Face took no legal action against OpenAI.
Delangue also credited Chinese lab Z.ai's open model GLM 5.2 with helping contain the breach, saying American commercial AI tools declined to assist because safety filters could not distinguish investigative code from an attack.
The potential deal follows Stripe's agreement to acquire OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, a startup valued at just $1.3 billion three months earlier. Investors are increasingly paying premium prices for the distribution layer between developers and AI models rather than the models themselves, a trend reinforced by Applied Compute's reported talks to raise about $3 billion.
