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XetHub CEO Yucheng Low. (LinkedIn Photo)
Hugging Face has acquired XetHub, a data storage and collaboration startup founded by former Apple engineers that helped developers streamline the process of building machine learning and artificial intelligence applications.
“Together we share a vision of democratizing AI to enable everyone to host, share, and build models and datasets,” XetHub CEO Yucheng Low wrote on LinkedIn. “At Hugging Face, we will continue to pursue this vision, integrating our technologies into the Hugging Face Hub to create the future of AI collaboration.”
The deal reflects the demand for data storage and compute needs driven by the AI boom, and is the latest in a string of smaller AI startups — and executives from those startups — getting gobbled up by larger companies.
New York-based Hugging Face offers a number of developer tools to help companies test, store, and run large-scale AI models that require substantial compute and storage capabilities. It raised a $235 million Series D round a year ago and acquired another developer tool startup called Argilla for $10 million in June.
Hugging Face isn’t sharing terms of the XetHub deal but says it’s the company’s largest acquisition to date. XetHub will add 14 employees to Hugging Face’s workforce.
Low co-founded Seattle-based XetHub in 2021. He previously worked at Turi, a Seattle machine learning startup that was acquired in 2016 by Apple, where he then spent nearly five years. Low is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned a PhD in machine learning.
XetHub co-founder Rajat Arya also worked at Turi and Apple. He previously worked at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.
The startup’s third co-founder, Ajit Banerjee, is a former senior software architect at Apple who co-founded a Seattle job interviewing and matching startup called TalentWorks.
“When Amazon recommends a product, or Gmail auto-suggests an email reply, or Apple’s FaceID unlocks a screen: these are examples of intelligent applications,” Arya told GeekWire last year. “Up until now, this AI-powered functionality has been limited to those big players, but increasingly we’re going to see every business adopt AI.”
XetHub raised a $7.5 million round last year from Madrona Ventures.
I am super excited to announce that we’ve acquired XetHub! 🎊The @xetdata team has developed technologies to enable Git to scale to TeraByte-size repositories.Under the hood they’ve been adding file chunking and deduplication inside Git.This will help us unlock the next 5… pic.twitter.com/0rlVRJxElF— Julien Chaumond (@julien_c) August 8, 2024
