Today’s Top Talent Pools

Hugging Face, the open-source AI hub where developers share and download models, has reportedly agreed to be acquired by Nvidia for $12.9B, per The Information — with Business Insider reporting the figure at more than $13B and the agreement not yet signed. The company last raised $235M at a $4.5B valuation in its August 2023 Series D, led by Salesforce Ventures with Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and IBM participating — so the deal is roughly a 3x markup in three years. Nvidia was an investor in that round. Business Insider reports Hugging Face previously held talks with Microsoft.

  1. Amanpreet Singh in SF Bay Area (Stealth)

    1. Role: Research Team Lead @ Hugging Face (1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: Co-Founder & CTO @ Contextual AI ($80M from Greycroft, Bain Capital Ventures, Lightspeed), Staff Research Engineer @ Facebook AI

    3. Description: Stealth since 8/25

  2. Victor Sanh in NYC (Stealth)

    1. Role: Lead Research Scientist, founding crew @ Hugging Face (6 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: AI builder @ H Company

    3. Description: Stealth since 4/25

  3. Ali Abdalla in SF (Founder @ Shotwell)

    1. Role: ML Engineer, Gradio team @ Hugging Face (4.5 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: Founder @ Gradio (acq by Hugging Face 2021), Mechanical Design Engineer @ Tesla, Undergraduate Researcher, d'Arbeloff Lab @ MIT

    3. Description: “Shotwell provides fast, accurate and dense annotations for robotics training data. We segment long videos into discrete steps and detect failures in each step.”

    4. Funding: YC P26

  4. Ali Abid in SF Bay Area (Founder @ Shotwell)

    1. Role: Senior SWE @ Hugging Face (4.5 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: Cofounder & Lead Engineer @ Gradio (acq by Hugging Face 2021), SWE @ Google, early employee @ Uhana (acq by VMware), Georgia Tech

    3. Description: “Shotwell provides fast, accurate and dense annotations for robotics training data. We segment long videos into discrete steps and detect failures in each step.”

    4. Funding: YC P26

  5. Ajit Banerjee in Greater Seattle (Founder & CEO @ SageOx) - Venture Lead

    1. Role: Architect @ Hugging Face (<1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: Co-Founder @ XetData (acq by Hugging Face 2024), Senior Software Architect @ Apple, Principal Engineer @ Facebook

    3. Description: “Agentic engineering makes coding fast but alignment hard. SageOx fixes that. It's the agentic hivemind, capturing shared context for humans and agents. Human insight, machine speed, everyone plowing in the same direction.”

    4. Funding: $15M Seed from Canaan, Pioneer Square Labs

  6. Nathan Lambert in Seattle (Stealth)

    1. Role: Research Scientist & RLHF Team Lead @ Hugging Face (1.5 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: Senior Research Scientist @ Allen Institute for AI, Research Scientist Intern @ DeepMind, PhD Candidate & Instructor @ UC Berkeley

    3. Description: Left AI2 6/26 — "Building Open Language Models @ (stealth)"

  7. Léo Tronchon in Paris (Potential Founder)

    1. Role: ML Research Engineer, Research Scientist Intern @ Hugging Face (2.5 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: Founding Research Engineer @ UMA ($40M from Greycroft, Kima Ventures), Core Team Researcher @ H Company, ENS Paris-Saclay, McGill

    3. Description: Left UMA 5/26

  8. Nazneen Rajani in SF Bay Area (CEO @ Collinear AI)

    1. Role: Research Lead @ Hugging Face (2 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: Research Scientist @ Salesforce, Research Scientist Intern @ IBM Watson, UT Austin PhD

    3. Description: Founded Collinear AI 1/24. Led development of Zephyr at Hugging Face

    4. Funding: Backed by Firestreak Ventues, Engineering Capital

  9. Guilherme Penedo in France (Co-founder & CEO @ Macrodata Labs)

    1. Role: ML Research Engineer @ Hugging Face (3 yrs)

    2. Description: “Macrodata Labs helps robotics teams turn raw physical-world data into better training datasets.”

  10. Hynek Kydlíček in Plzeň (CTO @ Macrodata Labs)

    1. Role: ML Engineer @ Hugging Face (2.5 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: ML Engineer @ Blindspot AI, Charles University

    3. Description: Became CTO of Macrodata Labs 6/26, co-founded with Guilherme Penedo

    4. Funding: Backed by AirStreet Capital, Kima Ventures

  11. Cyril Zakka, MD in Palo Alto (CEO @ Almanac Health)

    1. Role: ML Researcher, Health Lead @ Hugging Face (1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: Postdoctoral Research Fellow @ Stanford

    3. Description: Became CEO of Almanac Health 10/25

  12. Baptiste Colle in Dublin (Stealth)

    1. Role: ML Engineer @ Hugging Face (1.5 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: Founder @ SubstrateAI, ML Engineer @ ASML, ML Engineer @ HyperAI, Teaching Assistant @ TU Delft

    3. Description: Stealth since 12/25

  13. Yifeng Yin in SF (Stealth)

    1. Role: ML Engineer @ Hugging Face (2.5 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: ML Engineer @ Hive, Johns Hopkins

    3. Description: Stealth since 10/25

  14. Michael Song in United States (Potential Founder)

    1. Role: Director of Product Development @ Hugging Face (5 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: Senior DevOps Engineer @ Microsoft, System Administrator @ Oracle, Systems Engineer @ VMware

    3. Description: Left Hugging Face 9/25

  15. Filip Marciniak in SF Bay Area (Potential Founder)

    1. Role: Head of Product @ Hugging Face (3 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: Principal PM @ Arm

    3. Description: Left Hugging Face 9/25

  16. Carlos Muñoz Ferrandis in Spain (Co-founder & COO @ Alinia AI)

    1. Role: Tech & Regulatory Affairs Counsel, AI @ Hugging Face (1.5 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: Expert on AI Incidents, Risks & Privacy @ OECD.AI, PhD Researcher @ Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Contributor @ Stanford CodeX, Co-Founder @ HIGH Technology Law Forum

    3. Description:

    4. Funding: $7.5M Seed from Muora, Precursor, Speedinvest

  17. Aleksandra Piktus in Paris (Potential Founder)

    1. Role: Research Scientist @ Hugging Face (1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: Member of Technical Staff @ Cohere, Research Engineer @ Facebook AI, SWE @ Facebook AI, Sapienza, Jagiellonian

    3. Description: Left Cohere 4/25, currently unattached

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