Opening article
Hugging Face has acquired Pollen Robotics, a company that has built open‑source humanoid robots for nine years. The deal expands Hugging Face’s LeRobot library, which launched in 2024 and has become the most used hub for open robotics. The first robot now available through Hugging Face is Reachy 2, a $70,000 humanoid robot used by research labs such as Cornell and Carnegie Mellon.
Simon Alibert and Rémi Cadène from the LeRobot team with Reachy 1 — Photo: Léa Crespi
Since Hugging Face started the LeRobot library in 2024, led by ex-Tesla lead Remi Cadene, the Hugging Face Hub has quickly become the most widely used hub and software platform for open robotics with models, datasets, spaces and libraries.
Today, we’re excited to take it a step further by welcoming Pollen Robotics to Hugging Face, a team that's spent the last 9 years building open-source robots and hardware.
Pollen Robotics, established in 2016, is a leading developer of open-source humanoid robots designed for advanced research and real-world applications. Founded by former researchers from Inria's Flowers team, including Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet, the company leverages years of experience at the intersection of robotics hardware and applied artificial intelligence, to develop innovative and user-friendly robotic platforms. Reachy 2 is the latest generation of Pollen Robotics’ flagship humanoid robot. Designed as a versatile platform for embodied AI, Reachy 2 combines advanced hardware with user-friendly software, enabling intuitive interactions and agile manipulation. With open-source hardware and software at its core, Reachy 2 provides researchers, and developers unprecedented freedom to explore human-robot interactions, machine learning applications, and practical AI-driven tasks.
We believe robotics could be the next frontier unlocked by AI — and it should be open, affordable, and private. 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.
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. 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.
This marks the fifth acquisition for Hugging Face, after notable additions like Gradio and XetHub .
By merging open‑source robotics with a leading AI platform, Hugging Face lowers barriers for developers to integrate physical agents into AI workflows, potentially accelerating embodied AI research and deployment.