Thirty Five Ventures' Early Hugging Face Bet Nears $60M Value on Nvidia's Reported $12.9B Deal
Nvidia has reportedly agreed to acquire the open-source AI platform for $12.9 billion, a deal that would turn an estimated $250,000 early investment by Durant and Rich Kleiman's firm into a stake worth more than $60 million.
- Reported acquisition price
- Nvidia reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B
- Reported stake value
- Durant's position estimated at $60M+, up from roughly $250K (reported)
- Platform scale
- Hosts 2M+ models, 1M+ applications, 500k+ datasets, per the company
- Enterprise user base
- More than 50,000 organizations using the platform, per the company
- Enterprise pricing
- Plans start at $20/user/month, per the company
Thirty Five Ventures, the investment firm led by Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman, stands to record a significant windfall from an early position in Hugging Face if Nvidia's reported $12.9 billion acquisition of the open-source AI platform proceeds. Reports estimate Durant's initial outlay at roughly $250,000, with the current value of that stake placed at more than $60 million.
Hugging Face has grown into one of the largest repositories for machine learning collaboration, hosting more than two million models, one million applications, and 500,000 datasets. More than 50,000 organizations, including Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Intel, use the platform. The company offers enterprise plans starting at $20 per user per month alongside GPU compute infrastructure priced from $0.60 per hour, and it positions itself as the collaboration layer for the broader machine learning community.
Thirty Five Ventures backed the company across multiple early funding rounds and continued to support it as the platform scaled, giving the firm one of the longer-tenured positions in what has become a central piece of open-source AI infrastructure.
Why it matters
The reported deal illustrates how athlete-affiliated venture vehicles have moved well beyond endorsement arrangements into substantive early-stage technology investing. A position in an infrastructure-layer AI company, taken before the category attracted mainstream capital, is precisely the kind of patient, high-conviction bet that institutional funds typically make. If the Nvidia transaction closes at the reported valuation, the Hugging Face investment would stand as one of the more consequential early-stage returns linked to a professional-athlete-backed firm, and it reinforces the case for celebrity-associated capital as a serious participant in venture rather than a peripheral one.
What to watch
The central open question is whether Nvidia's acquisition of a widely used open-source AI platform clears regulatory review at the reported $12.9 billion price. Consolidation of community-facing infrastructure under one of the world's largest chip manufacturers will attract scrutiny from competition authorities, and the final terms, timeline, and any structural conditions attached to a potential deal have not been disclosed.
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