- Hugging Face — a company that built a mobile app allowing users to chat with an AI-based friend — announced it raised $15 million
Hugging Face — a company that built a mobile app allowing users to chat with an artificial intelligence-based friend — announced it has raised $15 million in funding led by Lux Capital. And the company also launched an open-source library for natural language processing applications.
A.Capital, Betaworks, Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher, OpenAI CTO Greg Greg Brockman, professional basketball player Kevin Durant, and several others also participating in today’s funding round.
Hugging Face launched its first version of the chatbot in early 2017. And the company has been developing more sophisticated chatbots since then. With the Hugging Face app, you can send text messages back and forth with the chatbot. And the Hugging Face chatbot is able to detect emotions and adapt its answers based on your feelings.
Lux Capital principal Brandon Reeves pointed out via TechCrunch that there has been a lot of progress around computer vision and image processing, but natural language is behind.
The Hugging Face open-source framework called Transformers has been downloaded over a million times. And on Github, the project is at over 19,000 stars. Plus researchers at Microsoft, Google, and Facebook are tinkering around with the Transformers technology.
With this round of funding, Hugging Face plans to increase its employee base in New York and Paris.
