Hugging Face acquires Pollen Robotics, will sell the $70,000 open-source Reachy 2

Hugging Face just made its most direct bet yet that AI’s next big platform shift is physical. The company has acquired Pollen Robotics, the French outfit behind the open-source humanoid robot Reachy 2, and will begin selling the $70,000 machine directly. This is the fifth acquisition for the AI platform, but the first one that puts actual hardware into its users’ hands.

Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face’s co-founder and chief scientist, framed the deal around an ideology as much as a business line. “We believe robotics could be the next frontier unlocked by AI — and it should be open, affordable, and private,” he said. Pollen co-founder Matthieu Lapeyre echoed that their goal is making robots the “interface between AI and the physical world.” It’s a direct shot at the walled-garden approach of companies like Tesla, whose Optimus robot was where Hugging Face’s own robotics lead, Remi Cadene, previously worked.

The timing isn’t subtle. Hugging Face’s LeRobot project just hit its one-year mark, racking up over 12,000 GitHub stars and a community of DIY builders that’s become a genuine phenomenon on Discord and YouTube. Last fall, the team partnered to release the SO-100 arm — a $100-ish build-it-yourself kit that became one of the most accessible entry points into robotics. That project got a rocket boost when Nvidia used the SO-100 arm to demonstrate fine-tuning of its GR00T N1 foundation model. The Reachy 2 acquisition moves the needle from hobbyist arms to full humanoid research platforms already deployed at Cornell and Carnegie Mellon.

What makes this feel less like a standard acqui-hire and more like infrastructure-building is the cadence of what preceded it. In the past twelve months, Hugging Face went from hiring Cadene to launching a library, shipping tutorials, partnering with Nvidia on acceleration workflows, and releasing the largest multimodal driving dataset for spatial intelligence. The Pollen deal isn’t a pivot — it’s the next logical step in a sequence that’s been accelerating. Whether anyone outside of well-funded labs will actually buy a $70,000 robot is an open question, but that’s never been the point with Hugging Face’s long-game bets.