Salesforce leads the investment! AI startup Hugging Face's latest round of financing is valued at over $4 billion.

Open-source "leader" Hugging Face's potential is accelerating with a new round of financing, with a valuation exceeding $4 billion.

On August 23, according to the technology media outlet The Information, Hugging Face is expected to raise at least $200 million in the upcoming financing round, with a valuation of $4 billion, led by cloud computing company Salesforce.

This valuation has doubled compared to last year when the company was valued at approximately $2 billion in a previous financing round by Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, and Coatue Management.

The report points out that the valuation in the latest financing round is more than 100 times its annual revenue. Analysis suggests that Hugging Face's development is progressing rapidly, with annual revenue expected to exceed $30 million.

In a previous article, Hugging Face was considered the most powerful contender in open-source alternatives to ChatGPT. In April of this year, Hugging Face released the HuggingChat chatbot, which is based on the 300 billion-parameter LLaMA model and is touted as the "open-source version of the Android app store."

Hugging Face began exploring commercialization in 2021 and now has over 5,000 corporate clients, including Intel, Microsoft, and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Since 2021, the company has consistently maintained positive cash flow.

Hugging Face is the fastest-growing machine learning library in GitHub's history, with the Transformer open-source library accumulating over 96,302 stars and more than 20,000 forks. In addition, Hugging Face has contributed and shared 166,894 trained models and 26,900 datasets.

Analysis suggests that Salesforce's financing indicates that it may view Hugging Face as a potential acquisition target in the future. While Salesforce is known for its SaaS software and Slack chat application, it also provides a range of services for software developers.