betaworks: from Hugging Face's first backer to an AI-native fund

betaworksDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → is the New York venture studio and early-stage investor behind one of the defining AI exits of the decade — an early bet on Hugging Face.

First backer of Hugging Face. Hugging Face graduated from the very first betaworks Camp cohort (BotCamp) in 2016, when the programme was focused on NLP and conversational interfaces. betaworks backed the company at that earliest stage and again in its 2017 seed round — years before Hugging Face became a multi-billion-dollar hub for open-source AI models.

A marquee return. Hugging Face has since raised through a $235M Series D in 2023 that valued it at roughly $4.5bn, with betaworks remaining on the cap table alongside investors such as Sequoia, Coatue and Lux. It stands as one of betaworks' standout wins from its Camp accelerator programme.

Now an AI-native fund. In July 2025 betaworks closed its $66M Fund III, a pre-seed/seed vehicle dedicated to early-stage AI — agents, native AI interfaces and application-layer AI. Since Camp launched in 2016, the firm has backed roughly 100 companies across 12 classes, including Granola, RecRoom and The Browser Company, building on earlier bets such as Tumblr, Kickstarter and Everlane.

Read more: TechCrunch · betaworks