The claim: The number every outlet ran this week, $250,000 into $60 million, a 240x gross return, requires Thirty Five Ventures to hold 0.465% of Hugging Face at closing. No filing, no company statement and no spokesperson has disclosed a percentage. The two documents Hugging Face did file with the SEC, plus its own funding announcements, put Kevin Durant in four financing rounds. The multiple everyone quotes uses two.
The numbers: Hugging Face’s 2018 seed Form D reports $3,315,000 sold against a $4,000,000 offering, to six investors, in debt. The 2019 Series A Form D reports $19,710,523 sold to 30 investors and states on its face that the figure includes conversion of the earlier notes. $60,000,000 divided by $12,900,000,000 is 0.465%.
The catalyst: The acquisition is reported and unconfirmed, and the two outlets that broke it disagree. The Information reports an agreed deal at $12.9bn; Business Insider reports talks that “had not yet produced a signed agreement.” The payout stories ran on the 27th and 28th.
Wrong if: Thirty Five Ventures discloses that its Series B and Series C checks were immaterial, or Durant’s closing stake is confirmed near 0.465% on a $250,000 basis. Either kills this and I withdraw it.
Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the repository where open AI models are hosted and downloaded, for $12.9 billion. Inside a day the second story had eaten the first. Kevin Durant put in $250,000. Kevin Durant is getting $60 million. Twenty-four thousand percent.
I went looking for the cap table behind that arithmetic, expecting a disclosed stake and a lazy multiplication on top. The stake isn’t there. So I pulled Hugging Face’s own SEC filings and read the fields one at a time, then checked the investor list of every round it has announced. Both contradict the coverage.
Below the paid line:
The $60,000,000 sensitivity table line by line: what 240x becomes on a $500,000 basis then a $750,000 basis then $1,250,000 and finally $2,250,000 against the 6.45x ceiling every Series C dollar drags it toward
Both Form Ds field by field: the
isDebtTypeflag that makes the seed’s ownership unobservable, and the clarification that counts $3,315,000 twiceThe verbatim investor lists from TechCrunch’s March 2021 Series B and Hugging Face’s own Series C post, the two documents that break the denominator
Why both headline numbers are wrong and move in opposite directions, plus the 0.465% stake the payout silently requires
Nvidia’s own position in the $235 million Series D, and the $42.3 billion of unnamed private stakes on its balance sheet
Four confounds I cannot rule out, including the 10% to 20% escrow convention and the unsigned agreement
