Notice the choice of words: "Most of our OSS and free usage cost". Who knows what's omitted from that. Also assuming they have zero money left in the bank from the prev round (they def didn't) they're losing/burning $2mm a month
26 karma · joined August 24, 2023
HF did an amazing job in community building, transformers library and being the central store for all oss models. That said they are ages away from PMF and just have a bunch of different products non of them commercially successful (services, autotrain, quantization, HF hub for EE, inference end points etc). The majority of their revenue comes from partnerships with SageMaker/Azure where they pay them for sending users their way which wouldn't continue to grow.
While it's always a possibility for a FANG company to buy them IMO they are completely screwed. At a $4.5B valuation they will have to reach at minimum $250m in ARR to IPO and at the moment they're probably stuck at around $25m ARR.