Kevin Durant's Hugging Face Bet and Nvidia's $12.9B Deal

TL;DR: Nvidia has reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion. Kevin Durant's Thirty Five Ventures put $100,000 into Hugging Face's 2018 seed round and $150,000 into its 2019 Series A. Sports-business writer Joe Pompliano estimates that $250,000 could now be worth more than $60 million — his estimate, not a confirmed payout.

I've spent years underwriting risk the hard way — first verifying nuclear systems where a bad sign-off cost lives, later raising and losing real money in deals that looked cleaner on paper than they turned out to be. A headline like this one is a Deal Autopsy in disguise: a public private-markets event with a number attached, and my job is to open it up and show you what actually holds. The number is the easy part. The sourcing underneath it is what I check before I let anyone draw a lesson from it. (source: Wired)

What Nvidia Is Reportedly Buying

Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the open-source AI developer platform, for close to $12.9 billion, according to Wired. The company had raised nearly $400 million in venture funding as of December 2025, per PitchBook data cited in that same report. It started life in 2016 as a chatbot app, not the AI infrastructure company it is today, according to The Economic Times. I've watched that pivot before. The asset you underwrite at seed is rarely the asset that exits, and that gap is the whole reason this story needs a second look instead of a headline read.

How Did Durant's $250,000 Get Into Hugging Face?

Kevin Durant and his business partner Rich Kleiman invest through Thirty Five Ventures, the firm they founded in 2016. The 2018 seed round raised $4 million and was led by Ronny Conway; Durant's piece of it was a reported $100,000, per Celebrity Net Worth, citing sports-business reporter Joe Pompliano as the original source of the figure. A year later, Lux Capital led a $15 million Series A, and Durant added another $150,000, the same reporting says. By 2022, when Hugging Face raised a $100 million Series C at roughly a $2 billion valuation, Thirty Five Ventures was still on the cap table, named among existing backers in the company's own announcement, per Celebrity Net Worth. I read that as a firm that stayed in, round after round. That matters more than the entry price.

Round	Year	Durant's check	Round size	Lead
Seed	2018	$100,000	$4 million	Ronny Conway
Series A	2019	$150,000	$15 million	Lux Capital
Series C (participated)	2022	Not disclosed	$100 million	—

Is the $60 Million Figure Confirmed?

No. Downside first is the right way to read this one. Durant's actual ownership stake, and any dilution across four more funding rounds, have never been publicly disclosed either, a gap Ascendants flags as well. Everything built on top of that number, including the widely repeated "240 times the money" framing, is an estimate stacked on an estimate. I'm stating that once, here, because it's the whole story. Nowhere else in this piece does it need repeating.

The Investor Lesson: Access vs. Judgment

Here's my read. This is a venture power-law story, not a stock tip. One seed check returning 240 times its money is exactly what a venture portfolio is built to produce, and it's also why most seed checks return nothing. Durant didn't get this outcome by picking one company. Most of what a firm like Thirty Five Ventures backs stays private, stays illiquid, and will not look like this one.

For an investor already writing $25,000 to $250,000 checks, the real lesson isn't access, it's what happens to your position after you write it. Every round after the one you enter is a dilution event you didn't negotiate. Pro-rata rights, if you have them, cost real capital to exercise. Without them, your ownership shrinks quietly every time the company raises again. Hugging Face raised a Series A and a Series C after Durant's seed check, with no public record of what pro-rata rights, if any, he exercised in between. There's a second risk, and it cuts the other way. Hot AI rounds attract adverse selection. Sponsors with real access keep the best allocation for themselves and offer the rest to whoever will take it. I think reading an AI startup due diligence checklist built for this wave of infrastructure theater is a better use of that instinct than chasing this specific deal. Understanding how a vetted syndicate like Gaingels allocates across thousands of rounds, instead of one, is the more useful frame.

Access to a deal like this one was never the constraint that mattered. Judgment about sizing, dilution, and portfolio construction was, and it's the part current AI foundation-model funding rounds keep testing at every stage.

Common Mistakes

• Treating a single celebrity outcome as a repeatable strategy instead of one data point in a power-law distribution.
• Quoting the $60 million figure as confirmed rather than as an estimate.
• Ignoring dilution across the rounds that came after Durant's entry.
• Assuming this kind of return is typical of early-stage AI investing rather than the outlier it is.

FAQ

How much did Kevin Durant invest in Hugging Face? His firm, Thirty Five Ventures, put in $100,000 during the 2018 seed round and $150,000 during the 2019 Series A, for a reported $250,000 total, per Celebrity Net Worth.

Is the $60 million figure confirmed? No. It's sports-business reporter Joe Pompliano's estimate, and Durant's actual stake and dilution have never been publicly disclosed, according to Ascendants.

Is the Nvidia-Hugging Face deal finalized? Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion, according to Wired, but the transaction had not closed as of these reports.

What did Hugging Face do before this deal? It started as a chatbot app in 2016 and became an open-source AI developer platform, raising close to $400 million in venture funding along the way, according to Wired.

What's the actual lesson for an active angel or LP? A single outlier doesn't validate a strategy. Watch dilution across every round after your entry, and treat allocation in a hot AI deal as a signal to check who else got in, not a reason to skip diligence.

The Bottom Line

Size any check into a deal like this as money you can lose entirely, and ask what your realistic base rate looks like across twenty bets, not one. If you want the frameworks for building that base rate instead of chasing single headlines, the free AIN briefing is where we cover the next one.

Educational content only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Not an offer or solicitation to buy or sell securities. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Private-market investments are illiquid and involve risk of loss, including total loss of capital. Consult qualified advisers. Angel Investors Network is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser.