Hacker News Reader

Comment by Conol_ai | Hacker News Reader

The more interesting is HF turned down a $500M Nvidia investment late last year at a $7B valuation, after passing on a $235M round in 2023 at $4.5B — going from "we don't want a dominant investor" to a $13B full acquisition in under a year is quite the reversal.

View on HN

Oh yeah, so surprising to refuse $500M that go in the pockets of your company that is now owned in large part by the investor, but then accept $13B that go directly in your own pockets.

Well, if they didn't want a dominant investor, they didn't get one, they got acquired.

Money from a dominant investment doesn’t accrue to the founders. Money from an acquisition does.

Seems the opposite of a reversal to me.

Reversal would be "valued at 7B then valued at nothing", this is more like "nah, we want more" then "nah, we want more" then "yes, that's what we want :)".

Sounds like it was just too much money for the stakeholders to refuse

Yea, my bet is that there is quite a long list of money bags sitting behind the leadership team that will weigh in if the offer is juicy enough.

Double or nothing

I don't think they passed on the 4.5 billion. They still raised it in 2023 with investors like Alphabet etc. They turned Nvidia *earlier this year* for the $7 billion valuation deal. It makes sense if they were angling for an acquisition.

This is the article you are referring to is this but your facts are wrong: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/hugging-face-reportedly-in...

its always the most virtue signaling people (sam on "openess", dario on pretty much every word coming out of his mouth, HF) that ends up doing the worst things because they always tend to extreme. Funny to see them joining the biggest corporation on earth by market cap after the every day virtue signaling of pretty much every employee working for them.

very few people can lock a vision and fight billions dollars with integrity. In tech they mostly end up shadowed. People like JB Kempf with VLC or Bellard. Maybe even Torvald or Jeremy Howard belong to this list of people who could have been way richer than they are now if they wanted to go against their visions and beliefs.

Everyone's got a price and NVidia found it

for real bro? 13B compared to 500M damnnnn I value hackernews too highly

Reply on news.ycombinator.com