Hugging Face bridges gap between AI and physical world with Pollen Robotics acquisition

In a decision signaling its move into the physical world, artificial intelligence leader Hugging Face has acquired French robotics firm Pollen Robotics. The companies yesterday announced the acquisition for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition underscores Hugging Face’s ambition to position robots as the next frontier for AI, advocating for an open, accessible, and customizable future.

The driving force behind this push is Hugging Face’s burgeoning robotics initiative, spearheaded by former Tesla engineer Remi Cadene. The acquisition of Pollen Robotics, founded in 2016 by Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet, brings that company’s flagship product, Reachy, into Hugging Face’s portfolio.

The modular humanoid robot was designed for research and education. Its latest iteration, Reachy 2, boasts features such as virtual reality (VR) teleoperation, stereo vision, and spatial audio. The $70,000 robot is currently deployed in institutions such as Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University.

I got the opportunity to interact with Reachy 2 at CES 2025. The platform features a wheeled base, two arms, and pincher-like grippers. The demonstrations at CES 2025 were all run by an onsite operator using a VR headset for telepresence.

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Hugging Face looks to embodied AI

The Pollen Robotics team is friendly with the open-source community, an aspect of its go-to-market strategy that likely attracted the attention of Hugging Face. The company added that Reachy 2 is suitable for embodied AI experiments.

“From the start, we built Pollen Robotics with open source at its core, driven by our belief that robots will play a profound role in our lives — serving as the interface between AI and the physical world.” said Matthieu Lapeyre, co-founder of Pollen Robotics. “Hugging Face is a natural home for us to grow, as we share a common goal: putting AI and robotics in the hands of everyone.”

Hugging Face added that its strategic acquisition aims to integrate its AI tools with Reachy’s sophisticated hardware. This fusion will empower researchers and developers to construct tailored, open-source robotic systems, breaking down the barriers imposed by proprietary software and hardware, it asserted.

The company‘s leaders suggested that this fusion will accelerate innovation in the field, making advanced robotics more readily available to a wider audience.

“We believe robotics could be the next frontier unlocked by AI — and it should be open, affordable, and private,” said Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief scientist at Hugging Face. “Our vision: a future where everyone in the community, from hobbyists to enterprises, can build or use robot assistants or games, starting from open solutions instead of closed, remote-controlled, hardware.”