Gunderson Dettmer Represents Addition and Lux Capital in Hugging Face Sale to NVIDIA for $12.9 Billion

Gunderson Dettmer represented venture capital firms Addition and Lux Capital as key long-term investors in Hugging Face—the AI industry’s de-facto repository of open-source models—in connection with the company’s $12.9 billion proposed sale to NVIDIA.

Hugging Face, founded in 2016, is one of the most popular hubs where developers share and download open-source AI models. Together, NVIDIA will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure, and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.

Under the terms of the agreement, Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models, the frameworks, the clouds and inference service providers, and the computing platforms they want. NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.

The Gunderson Dettmer team was led by M&A partners Andrew Luh, John Olson and Jennifer Sayles Okorn and corporate partners Greg Volkmar and Nick Harley.