Hugging Face, the French-American company that provides open-source tools to develop AI applications, has acquired French robotics startup Pollen Robotics for an undisclosed sum.
The move marks a first step into hardware for Hugging Face, which is now selling Pollen Robotics’ Reachy 2, a humanoid robot powered by open-source code.
The move marks an acceleration of Hugging Face’s expansion into AI-powered robotics, which started last year when Tesla alumni Remi Cadene joined the company to lead new open-source robotics projects.
In a blog post announcing the acquisition, Hugging Face said that it anticipates “massive growth in the space”, with CEO Clément Delangue previously predicting that in 2025 “at least 100,000 personal AI robots will be pre-ordered”.
From software to hardware
Hugging Face is originally a software company. Launched in Paris in 2016, it has built a platform that hosts AI models and provides tools for engineers to build, train and deploy the technology for their own use cases. It focuses on open-source technologies, meaning that users share the code behind the models and are encouraged to collaborate with each other to build new ones.
Last year, the company launched a new library dedicated to open-source code for robotics. It also started collaborating with Pollen Robotics to build Reachy 2.
The robot is open-source, meaning that it was trained with open-source code, but also that the dataset and code used to build it are available to download and change for free. Users can therefore train the robot and experiment with their own software.
Pollen Robotics says that the robot has been adopted by prominent research labs like Cornell University or Carnegie Mellon University.
“Robotics could be the next frontier unlocked by AI — and it should be open, affordable, and private,” said Hugging Face cofounder Thomas Wolf.
“Our vision: a future where everyone in the community, from hobbyists to enterprises, can build or use robot assistants or games, starting from open solutions instead of closed, remote controlled, hardware.”
With the acquisition, Hugging Face is now selling Reachy 2 for $70k.
It is Hugging Face’s fifth acquisition to date, with previous operations including machine learning startup Gradio in 2021 and data platform XetHub in 2024.
