Hugging Face Acquires Pollen Robotics, Marking Its First Move into Hardware

Hugging Face, the AI company best known for its open-source model repository, has acquired Pollen Robotics for an undisclosed amount, marking its first step into selling hardware. Pollen's co-founders and approximately 20 employees will join Hugging Face. Pollen, founded in 2016 in Bordeaux, France, had raised €2.5 million in venture capital. The company produces the Reachy 2 humanoid robot, priced at $70,000 and designed for academic research and testing embodied AI applications. Reachy 2 is currently used by researchers at Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University. Co-founder Thomas Wolf stated that robots should be controlled by open-source AI models because safety is essential with systems that can take physical actions.