Kevin Durant may be sitting on one of the biggest investment wins of his career.
Nvidia has reportedly agreed to acquire artificial intelligence company Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to Reuters. The deal has put fresh attention on Durant, whose investment firm backed Hugging Face years before ChatGPT made generative AI a household technology. Barron’s reports that a $250,000 investment by Durant could now be worth roughly $60 million.
Reporting shows that Durant’s history with Hugging Face begins earlier and includes more funding rounds than that figure suggests. He is identified as an investor as early as March 2017, when Hugging Face has raised just $1.2 million and is pursuing a very different business.
The company is trying to build an artificial friend for teenagers.
Durant finds Hugging Face after moving to Silicon Valley
Durant’s investment comes during his first season with the Golden State Warriors. His 2016 move from Oklahoma City puts him close to Silicon Valley as he and longtime business partner Rich Kleiman are expanding their investments beyond basketball. By September 2017, TechCrunch reports that The Durant Company has made about 30 investments.
The Bay Area gives Durant and Kleiman access to founders and investors who attend Warriors games and move through the same social and business circles. “We’d never have been introduced to a drone startup in Oklahoma City,” they tell TechCrunch while discussing how Durant’s move has changed their investment opportunities. Kleiman handles much of the incoming deal flow, while the pair evaluate companies and founders together.
Hugging Face is already among Durant’s investments. In March 2017, TechCrunch reports that the startup has raised $1.2 million from investors including Betaworks, SV Angel and Durant.
Co-founders Clément Delangue and Julien Chaumond are building a chatbot that users can message like a digital friend. It trades jokes, photographs and conversations with users, with a particular focus on teenagers. “We’re building an AI so that you’re having fun talking with it,” Delangue tells TechCrunch.
Durant’s individual investment is not disclosed.
Hugging Face abandons the business Durant originally backed
A year later, Hugging Face is still pursuing the chatbot. The company raises another $4 million in May 2018, and TechCrunch identifies Durant as an existing investor participating in the financing.
There are signs that people are using the product. Hugging Face says the chatbot is handling 1 million messages a day and has processed more than 100 million messages. Its 2018 securities filing with the Securities and Exchange Commissionrecords a $4 million offering and six participating investors, although the filing does not identify them or disclose their individual investments.
The consumer app does not become the large business Hugging Face is seeking. The company has also been developing natural-language-processing technology behind the chatbot, and it begins releasing some of that work as open-source software. Developers respond more strongly to those tools than consumers do to the original app.
Hugging Face shifts its attention to them.
By December 2019, the company is raising a $15 million Series A led by Lux Capital around its open-source software. TechCrunch reports that Durant participates again, alongside A.Capital, Betaworks, Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman.
The product at the center of the company is now Transformers, a software library that gives developers easier access to language models. Lux Capital says the project has passed 1 million installations and accumulated about 19,000 stars on GitHub. Lux partner Brandon Reeves calls it “one of the fastest-growing open-source projects we have ever seen.”
Durant has gone from investing in Hugging Face’s original consumer product to participating in the financing of the company that replaces it.
Durant stays as Hugging Face grows into an AI platform
Hugging Face raises another $40 million in March 2021. TechCrunch again lists Durant and Kleiman among the investors, while the company’s Transformers project has grown to 42,000 GitHub stars and 10,000 forks.
The company is expanding beyond the software library that fueled its early developer growth. Hugging Face is building a platform where researchers and developers can find and share machine-learning models, datasets and other tools. That community becomes the foundation of the business Nvidia reportedly wants to buy today.
By May 2022, investors value Hugging Face at $2 billion. The company raises $100 million in a Series C led by Lux Capital, with Sequoia and Coatue also participating. Hugging Face identifies Durant and Kleiman of Thirty Five Ventures among its existing investors.
The company says its platform now hosts more than 100,000 pretrained models and 10,000 datasets, with more than 10,000 companies using its technology. Hugging Face has also grown from about 30 employees to more than 120 in the previous year.
OpenAI releases ChatGPT later that year, bringing generative AI to a much larger public audience. Investment pours into companies supplying the models, chips, software and infrastructure behind the technology.
Hugging Face raises $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation in August 2023. Google, Amazon, Salesforce, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and IBM participate in the round.
So does Nvidia.
Nvidia moves from investor to reported buyer
Nvidia’s investment comes more than six years after Durant is first publicly identified as a Hugging Face investor. The chipmaker’s interest continues as demand for AI computing pushes Nvidia into the center of the industry.
Reuters reports that Nvidia proposed investing another $500 million in Hugging Face in early 2025 at a valuation of roughly $7 billion. Hugging Face rejected the proposal.
Nvidia has now reportedly agreed to acquire the company for $12.9 billion. That price is nearly three times Hugging Face’s $4.5 billion valuation from 2023 and more than six times its $2 billion valuation from 2022.
Nvidia and Hugging Face have not publicly announced the transaction themselves as of September 2. The final terms, closing status and treatment of individual shareholders therefore remain undisclosed.
That includes Durant.
Durant’s full investment history is still private
Barron’s reports that Durant invested $250,000 in Hugging Face and could receive roughly $60 million from the Nvidia deal. Other reports have described the $250,000 as a $100,000 early investment followed by $150,000 in Hugging Face’s Series A.
The public record does not provide enough information to independently reproduce that calculation.
Durant is already named as an investor in March 2017. He appears again when Hugging Face raises money in 2018, when the company raises its Series A in 2019 and alongside Kleiman during the 2021 Series B. Hugging Face names Durant and Kleiman among its existing investors again in 2022.
The company’s SEC filings disclose how much Hugging Face raises in particular offerings but do not disclose Durant’s individual contributions or ownership. Its 2019 SEC filing, for example, reports $19.7 million sold to 30 investors and says the amount includes earlier convertible notes and Simple Agreements for Future Equity that converted during the financing.
Those records leave several details private: how much Durant invested across all of the rounds in which he appears, whether each appearance involved new money, how his ownership changed as Hugging Face issued additional shares and what percentage of the company he owns today.
A $60 million stake at a $12.9 billion valuation would equal roughly 0.47% of Hugging Face before any adjustments tied to the transaction. No public filing reviewed for this story discloses a Durant stake of that size.
The reported $60 million return may prove accurate. The information needed to confirm it remains private.
The history of Durant’s investment is easier to trace. He enters Hugging Face before its original consumer product has found a lasting business, stays as the company abandons that product and appears in subsequent financing as Hugging Face grows into an open-source AI platform.
Nvidia arrives years later.
If the reported acquisition closes, Durant will have held an investment in Hugging Face across nine years, several funding rounds and a complete change in the company’s business. His exact payout is still unknown.
The first public record of his involvement dates to March 2017, when Hugging Face had raised $1.2 million and was trying to build an artificial friend for teenagers.
Sources: Reuters; The Information; Barron’s; TechCrunch; Hugging Face; Lux Capital; U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; Thirty Five Ventures.
