Three French founders of the artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face have emerged as billionaires after a deal with Nvidia Corp. Nvidia agreed to buy the startup, which began in 2016 in Paris, in a transaction valued at roughly $13 billion.
Clement “Clem” Delangue, 38, Julien Chaumond, 42, and Thomas Wolf, 41, will each have a net worth of about $1.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which valued their fortunes for the first time.
A spokesperson for Brooklyn-based Hugging Face didn’t respond to requests for comment about the founders’ wealth.
The Hugging Face trio join the three founders of Paris-based Mistral AI as French nationals who have become billionaires through their stakes in AI and computing companies.
Also included in the cohort are Olivier Pomel and Alexis Le-Quoc, founders of New York-based Datadog Inc, Bloomberg reported.
The co-founder started their company a decade ago, choosing Hugging Face as a “temporary” name, and later joined billionaire Xavier Niel’s startup campus Station F, located in a redeveloped, century-old freight station in Paris.
In a post on LinkedIn ahead of the deal announcement, Station F said the three first arrived in 2017 to develop a chatbot for teenagers, then pivoted, began raising money, and were set to become a “titan of an exit.”
Clément Delangue is the CEO and co-founder of Hugging Face, an open and collaborative platform for AI builders.
With a background in entrepreneurship and education from Stanford University, Delangue has played a pivotal role in growing Hugging Face into a leading AI platform, hosting over a million open-source repositories and serving more than 15,000 companies integrating AI into their products and workflows.
His first startup experience was with Moodstocks, a developer of machine-learning based on image recognition technology, that was bought by Google, according to his LinkedIn profile.
He attended universities in Madrid, Dublin and Bangalore (IIM) before going to a French business school and taking an online introduction to computer science course at Stanford University, where co-founder Chaumond had completed some of his studies.
Julien Chaumond is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Hugging Face.
At Hugging Face, Julien has been pivotal in developing widely-used machine learning libraries, such as the Transformers Library, and has played a significant role in making large language models accessible and efficient for production use.
His contributions extend to the open-source community, where he has been involved in initiatives like the BigScience project, which focuses on creating large, multilingual language models through collaborative efforts.
Julien Chaumond's educational journey is marked by a strong foundation in engineering and computer science. He began his academic career at Lycée Hoche, where he served as a Teaching Assistant from September 2004 to March 2005.
