Hugging Face is taking an even deeper plunge into robotics with its planned acquisition of Pollen Robotics, the French startup behind humanoid robot Reachy 2.
Under the deal, the artificial intelligence (AI) startup Hugging Face will sell the $70,000 Reachy 2, the bot used for academic research at Carnegie Mellon University and Cornell University, as well as testing so-called “embodied AI” applications. Hugging Face is already collaborating with Pollen on open source for Reachy2.
Financial terms were not disclosed. Pollen co-founders Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet and about 20 employees based in Bordeaux, France, will join Hugging Face. To date, Pollen has raised about $2.8 million in venture capital funding.
For Hugging Face, which operates a repository of open-source and open-weight AI models, the acquisition signals an extended endeavor into robotics over the past year. Pollen’s robots, meanwhile, are designed to run open-source software, as well as let users modify the physical design of the robot.
“Robotics is going to be the next frontier that AI will unlock,” Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf told Fortune. He said having AI embodied in robots might help solve remaining challenges to achieve human-like artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Wolf said humanoid robots should be controlled by open-source AI models because safety and security were essential with a system that can take physical actions in the world.
Though the current Reachy2 model is pricey, Hugging Face wants to drive down the cost significantly, and eventually open-source its hardware completely so that anyone can download the blueprints for the physical design of the robot — and possibly use 3-D printers to manufacture their own parts, according to Wolf.
Hugging Face’s purchase of Pollen marks its first step into selling hardware after it buoyed its robotics software capabilities last year. The company hired Remi Cadene, a former researcher on Tesla Inc.’s Optimus humanoid, in March 2024, and two months later it launched LeRobot, an open-source robotics library code.
LeRobot, in turn, partnered with The Robot Studio, another French robotics company, in late 2024 to produce the SO-100 arm, a robot arm that costs $100. In March of this year, NVIDIA Corp. selected Hugging Face as its preferred platform for hosting its GR00T N1 open-source AI model for humanoid robots.
As humanoid robots become more sophisticated in hardware development, they are more likely to be used to “interact in a fun and interesting way” with the public rather than displace human workers, Wolf told Fortune. Some might be useful to assist in household tasks such as folding clothes, he added.
There is no debate they are coming amid an increasing intersection of robotics and open-source AI. In recent years, OpenAI and Meta Platforms Inc. have released their own open-source AI models.
