Hugging Face is in talks to sell itself at a valuation of $13 billion or more, and has hired a bank to gauge bidder interest, though the process hasn’t produced an agreement, according to Business Insider. A price at that level would be nearly triple the $4.5 billion valuation the company last carried in 2023, per PitchBook. Hugging Face hosts AI models that developers upload, browse, and pull into their own projects, which puts it in the tooling layer rather than the race to build frontier models. Stripe agreed earlier this month to acquire OpenRouter, an AI model marketplace in that same layer, at a price reported between $7 billion and $8 billion.
