StartupNew York, NY, United StatesFounded 2016
Open-source AI platform company whose LeRobot project provides robot-learning code, datasets and the SmolVLA vision-language-action model.
Hugging Face, founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf and based in New York, operates an open platform for sharing AI models, datasets and applications. It entered robotics with the open-source LeRobot library in 2024 and acquired Pollen Robotics, maker of the Reachy 2 humanoid, in April 2025. On September 2, 2026 NVIDIA signed a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face for about $11.9 billion plus an employee retention program of up to $1.0 billion; closing is expected in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals.
Sources: techcrunch.com (24 Aug 2023) · huggingface.co (14 Apr 2025) · sec.gov (2 Sep 2026)
Private company · $390M disclosed in USD across 4 of 4 listed rounds
| Date | Round | Amount | Lead | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 17 Dec 2019 | Series A | $15M | Lux Capital | techcrunch.com, 17 Dec 2019 |
| 11 Mar 2021 | Series B | $40M | Addition | techcrunch.com, 11 Mar 2021 |
| 9 May 2022 | Series CValuation: $2B | $100M | Lux Capital | huggingface.co, 9 May 2022 |
| 24 Aug 2023 | Series DValuation: $4.5B | $235M | n/a | techcrunch.com, 24 Aug 2023 |
#9 of 104 model companies · score 79.0 / 100 · updated 19 Oct 2026
Each bar shows an input from 0 to 100% before weighting. 1 of 1 listed models have open weights. Most-starred official repository: huggingface/lerobot (28.3k stars, 19 Oct 2026).
The score (0–100) measures public, checkable evidence about a company's robot models. It does not measure private capability. A company that publishes no benchmark results and no weights can still have strong models. Every input is computed from the data on each company page, and every number there links to its source.
| Input | Weight | How it is measured |
|---|---|---|
| Published benchmarks | 35% | For each scored benchmark, the company's best result divided by the best result any company has published, averaged over the benchmarks it reports. No published results scores 0. Results come only from the model's own paper, model card or the official benchmark leaderboard. Scored: LIBERO (4-suite average success, %); SimplerEnv Google Robot, visual matching (%); SimplerEnv Google Robot, variant aggregation (%); SimplerEnv WidowX / Bridge (%); CALVIN ABC→D (average length, 0–5); RoboArena (pairwise rating). |
| Open weights | 20% | Share of the company's listed models whose weights the public can download. |
| Adoption | 20% | GitHub stars on the company's most-starred official model repository, on a log scale relative to the most-starred repository in the list. Hugging Face downloads are shown on company pages but not scored, because gated repositories report zero. |
| Released models | 15% | Number of publicly announced, named models, capped at 5. |
| Disclosed funding | 10% | The sum of the funding rounds listed on the company's profile that were disclosed in USD, on a log scale from $10M to the largest sum in the list. Rounds reported only in other currencies are listed but not converted or counted. This input applies only to private startups and robot makers. For big-tech divisions, research labs and listed companies it is n/a, and its weight is shared across the other inputs in proportion. |
Sources. arXiv papers and official model cards for benchmarks and parameters; official leaderboards (RoboArena); the GitHub and Hugging Face APIs for stars and downloads; company announcements and established press for funding. Missing values are shown as n/a, never estimated.
Updated 19 Oct 2026. Benchmark protocols differ between papers, for example in fine-tuning and number of trials, so small gaps between close scores are not meaningful.
Open weightsVLA
Compact vision-language-action model with a flow-matching action expert, pretrained on community-contributed LeRobot datasets and designed to run on consumer hardware.
