NBA star Durant invests $250,000 in Hugging Face through seed and Series A rounds, now valued over $60 million
According to The Information, NVIDIA has agreed to acquire the open-source model platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, although neither party has publicly confirmed this. Kevin Durant and business partner Rich Kleiman participated in the seed and Series A rounds through Thirty Five Ventures. The seed round in 2018 was approximately $4 million, with Durant reportedly investing $100,000; the following year, in the Series A round, about $15 million was raised, with Durant investing another $150,000. Based on the acquisition valuation, these two investments totaling $250,000 could be worth over $60 million, exceeding his playing salary for this season.
Hugging Face's Series D valuation in 2023 was $4.5 billion, with NVIDIA participating with about $235 million, alongside Google, Amazon, and others. The platform reportedly has an annual revenue of about $150 million, with an implicit multiple of about 86 times. The community claims over 13 million users and more than 2 million public models. It previously rejected NVIDIA's offer for a minority stake of about $500 million. Microsoft has also been in contact. The open-source weight hub determines which models developers run, thus deciding where the next wave of computing power will land on which chip.
The star's check buys a chatbot team from 2018, cashing out on the model distribution layer of 2026. The $60 million figure is derived from third-party estimates based on rounds, not from a delivery confirmation. If the deal falls through, the numbers revert to zero; if it goes through, the open-source neutrality will be included in the chip company's balance sheet.
The seed round does not consider seasonal scoring. Whoever controls the entry at the model hosting layer owns the shelf that NVIDIA must buy.
In market mechanics, this is a chipmaker buying the distribution layer to hedge against open-source centrifugal forces. The buyer is NVIDIA, which needs to lock in the model hosting entry; the sellers are early check holders and the founding team. Funds flow from the acquisition price to seed and Series A shareholders. The beneficiaries are the Durant-Kleiman duo and NVIDIA itself, which entered in Series D; the pressured parties are developers hoping the platform remains multi-chip neutral and Microsoft, which has had negotiations fall through. The event-driven aspect is that acquisition rumors have turned the star's $250,000 into one of the best investments for athletes.
ABAB AI Insight
Durant's $100,000 plus $150,000 can turn into $60 million, relying not on shooting but on the eight years of open-source models evolving from toys to industrial products. Thirty Five Ventures has transformed the athlete's brand into a Silicon Valley pass, coinciding with the moment NVIDIA must acquire a GitHub-like hub. NVIDIA is already a shareholder, and a full acquisition acknowledges that minority stakes do not secure distribution rights. The 86 times revenue indicates that what is being bought is not profit, but the website that developers default to.
The capital path is the star's idle money entering the seed round, with industry buyers taking the shelf when the application layer matures. The valuation from Series D of $4.5 billion to $12.9 billion represents a near tripling in three years, driven by closed-source manufacturers beginning to develop their own chips, necessitating a neutral or assimilated dock for open-source weights. Rejecting a $500 million minority stake indicates a wait for a better price. After the acquisition, the dock owner and chip owner will become the same entity, ending the neutrality narrative.
Comparable cases include Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub and Google's acquisition of Kaggle. The athlete case closest to this is the early tech checks of Curry and LeBron, with few single checks matching a season's salary. The current phase is assimilation: the distribution rights of the open-source community are moving from Paris-New York startups to Santa Clara. After the move, the model cards will remain, but default recommendations may start to lean towards their own GPUs.
Structural judgment indicates capital concentration. The model distribution layer is concentrating towards chip monopolists. The mechanism is: wherever developers upload models, computing power orders will be generated there; whoever owns the model upload site will possess pre-orders for the next generation of clusters. The star's check is merely a lottery ticket valued at $60 million in this concentration process. The ticket can be redeemed because the buyer is more urgent than the community.