Some unexpected names are making a killing during the AI revolution.
Kevin Durant is one of them. Reports this week suggest that NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, and buried in that deal is a nine-year-old bet by an NBA superstar that nobody in tech circles was talking about until now.
Back in March 2017, Durant tweeted something that most of his followers probably scrolled right past: “Excited for the new release of #HuggingFace – proud investor!” At the time, Hugging Face wasn’t the company most of the AI world knows today. It was a chatbot app aimed at teenagers, built by three French founders who wanted to create something like a digital best friend that could pick up on a user’s emotions and respond accordingly. Durant, through his investment vehicle Thirty Five Ventures with longtime business partner Rich Kleiman, had put money into the company’s seed round alongside Betaworks and SV Angel. It was a small, unremarkable line item in what would become one of the more aggressive athlete investment portfolios in sports, sitting next to bets on Coinbase, Robinhood, Postmates and SeatGeek.
Hugging Face’s chatbot never really took off. It picked up around 100,000 daily active users at its peak, which sounds decent until you compare it to what the founders actually wanted, and the underlying language technology of that era simply wasn’t good enough to make an AI companion feel convincing. What the founders did have, though, was a library of natural language processing tools they had built to power the chatbot. When Google released BERT in October 2018, a language model that reshaped how the NLP field thought about training, Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf ported it to PyTorch over a single weekend and put it on GitHub. The response from researchers was immediate. Within a year, the company had formally abandoned the consumer chatbot altogether and rebuilt itself around an open-source Transformers library instead.
That decision turned Hugging Face into what’s now commonly described as the GitHub of machine learning, a platform hosting over a million models and hundreds of thousands of datasets, used by nearly every major AI lab and thousands of independent developers to share, test and deploy their work. It became less a product company and more a piece of infrastructure that the rest of the AI industry quietly depends on, which is exactly the kind of position that made it attractive to NVIDIA. Hugging Face was one of the most valuable AI startups in the world, reaching a $4.5 billion valuation in a 2023 round that NVIDIA itself participated in.
Durant’s stake, according to sports business journalist Joe Pompliano, worked out to roughly $250,000 total across the seed and Series A rounds, $100,000 in the earlier round and $150,000 in the one that followed. If the reported $12.9 billion NVIDIA deal closes at that valuation, Pompliano estimates Durant’s holding could be worth more than $60 million. That’s not a guaranteed figure since Durant’s exact equity stake was never made public, and both NVIDIA and Hugging Face have yet to confirm the acquisition on the record. But even taken as a rough estimate, it puts Durant’s nine-year-old tweet in a different light entirely.
For context, Durant is set to earn $43.9 million from the Houston Rockets this NBA season. A $250,000 check into a chatbot startup for teenagers may end up outearning an entire year of professional basketball. It’s the kind of return that Thirty Five Ventures was built to chase, betting on companies early enough that the eventual outcome looks almost accidental in hindsight, when in reality it was the product of getting in before anyone else understood what Hugging Face would become.