Hugging Face Bets on Open-Source Robots with Reachy 2 and Pollen Robotics Team

In 2024, Hugging Face launched its robotics initiative LeRobot, led by former Tesla robotics lead Remi Cadene. One year later, the GitHub repository for LeRobot has accumulated more than 12,000 stars, and a thriving DIY community has emerged on platforms like YouTube and Discord. Hugging Face has now taken the next step in its open-source robotics journey by acquiring Pollen Robotics, a French startup best known for building the humanoid robot Reachy 2.

Founded nearly a decade ago, Pollen Robotics has spent years developing open-source robots and hardware. Co-founder Matthieu Lapeyre described Hugging Face as a “natural home” for their mission, citing shared values around openness and accessibility. “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,” Lapeyre said.

The acquisition brings Pollen’s team of around 20 employees into Hugging Face, including co-founders Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet. According to a company spokesperson, this makes it Hugging Face’s largest acquisition by headcount. It is also the company’s fifth overall acquisition, following previous additions like Gradio and XetHub.

Hugging Face plans to sell Reachy 2, a bug-eyed, two-armed humanoid robot that is already in use at institutions such as Cornell and Carnegie Mellon. Designed for research, education, and embodied AI experiments, Reachy 2 is VR-compatible and fully open source.