AI company Hugging Face is taking a big leap into robotics with the acquisition of humanoid robotics startup Pollen Robotics. The financial terms were not disclosed, but Pollen’s co-founders, Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet, and approximately 20 Pollen employees will be joining Hugging Face. Pollen, which was founded in 2016 and is based in the French city of Bordeaux, had raised €2.5 million (about $2.8 million) in venture capital funding to date. The move will see Hugging Face selling Pollen’s $70,000 humanoid robot Reachy 2, which is designed for academic research, education, and testing “embodied AI” applications. The robot is currently used by robotics researchers at Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University, among others. Hugging Face had previously collaborated with Pollen on open source for Reachy 2. Pollen’s robots are designed to run open-source software, including freely-available AI models, as well as to allow users to potentially modify the physical design of the robot. Hugging Face, which is best known for running a large repository of open-source and “open-weight” AI models, has increasingly moved into robotics in the past year. “Robotics is going to be the next frontier that AI will unlock,” Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face’s co-founder and chief scientist, told Fortune.

Full report : Hugging Face gets into the humanoid robot game with Pollen Robotics purchase.