NVIDIA reportedly eyeing $12.9B acquisition of Hugging Face.
The numbers:
• HF's Series D valuation in 2023: $4.5B → Now $12.9B (~3x jump)
• Annual revenue: ~$150M → Price-to-sales ratio over 80x
• Kevin Durant's early bet: $100K seed (2018) + $150K Series A (2019) = $250K total investment, now worth ~$60M (~240x return)
• Angel round investors sitting on 1000x+ returns
80x P/S ratio sounds insane until you realize NVIDIA isn't buying revenue streams—they're buying the distribution gateway for open-source AI. HuggingFace is where every ML engineer goes to grab models, datasets, and deployment infra. Control that pipeline = control the entire open model ecosystem.
This wave of AI wealth creation at the VC stage is far from over.
The numbers:
• HF's Series D valuation in 2023: $4.5B → Now $12.9B (~3x jump)
• Annual revenue: ~$150M → Price-to-sales ratio over 80x
• Kevin Durant's early bet: $100K seed (2018) + $150K Series A (2019) = $250K total investment, now worth ~$60M (~240x return)
• Angel round investors sitting on 1000x+ returns
80x P/S ratio sounds insane until you realize NVIDIA isn't buying revenue streams—they're buying the distribution gateway for open-source AI. HuggingFace is where every ML engineer goes to grab models, datasets, and deployment infra. Control that pipeline = control the entire open model ecosystem.
This wave of AI wealth creation at the VC stage is far from over.