AI dev platform Hugging Face has acquired Pollen Robotics, a robotics startup primarily based in France, for an undisclosed quantity. Wired reports that Hugging Face plans to promote Pollen’s humanoid robotic, Reachy 2, and let builders obtain and recommend enhancements to its code.
Pollen Robotics, which goals to convey reasonably priced humanoid robots to the house, was based in 2016 by Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet. The corporate managed to boost €2.5 million (round $2.83 million) from traders together with Bpifrance previous to its exit, according to Crunchbase.
When you’ve adopted the progress of robotics previously 18 months, you have probably seen how robotics is more and more changing into the following frontier that AI will unlock.
At Hugging Face—in robotics and throughout all AI fields—we imagine in a future the place AI and robots are open-source,…
— Thomas Wolf (@Thom_Wolf) April 14, 2025
The acquisition marks an growth of Hugging Faces’ robotics efforts, with which Pollen was carefully concerned. Final 12 months, Hugging Face teamed up with Pollen to construct “Le Robotic,” and open supply robotic educated to do quite a lot of family chores. Hugging Face additionally established a robotics workforce led by Remi Cadene, a former robotics engineer from Tesla’s Optimus program.