Hugging Face Acquires Pollen Robotics to Advance Open-Source Humanoid Robots
This strategic move aims to democratize robotics by making cutting-edge technology more accessible for research, education, and real-world applications.
Opensource AI champion Hugging Face has announced its acquisition of French robotics startup Pollen Robotics, known for developing Reachy, a modular, open-source humanoid robot.
This strategic move aims to democratize robotics by making cutting-edge technology more accessible for research, education, and real-world applications.
Super happy to announce that we are acquiring @pollenrobotics to bring open-source robots to the world! 🤖
— Hugging Face (@huggingface) April 14, 2025
Since @RemiCadene joined us from Tesla, we’ve become the most widely used software platform for open robotics thanks to @LeRobotHF and the Hugging Face Hub. Now, we’re… pic.twitter.com/9PVLP2Nq1H
Under the leadership of former Tesla robotics engineer Remi Cadene, Hugging Face has been expanding into the robotics space through its “Le Robot” initiative. The acquisition of Pollen Robotics marks a major step toward creating open, affordable, and hackable robotic platforms.
At Hugging Face—in robotics and across all AI fields—we believe in a future where AI and robots are open-source, transparent, and affordable; community-built and safe; hackable and fun. We've had so much mutual understanding and passion working with the Pollen Robotics team over the past year that we decided to join forces! -Thomas Wolf, Co-founder at Hugging Face
Founded in 2016 by Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet, Pollen Robotics gained recognition for Reachy 2 — a bio-inspired robot featuring VR teleoperation, stereo vision, spatialized audio, and modular components. Already used by leading institutions like Cornell and Carnegie Mellon, Reachy 2 is available for purchase at $70,000.
Moving forward, Hugging Face plans to combine its AI models with Pollen’s hardware to enhance Reachy’s capabilities and accelerate the open robotics movement.
