Kevin Durant has built one of the most accomplished careers in NBA history, but one of his most lucrative moves may have happened far away from a basketball court.
Durant and longtime business partner Rich Kleiman were early investors in artificial-intelligence company Hugging Face, participating in both its seed and Series A funding rounds. According to sports business reporter Joe Pompliano, Durant invested $100,000 in the company’s seed round and another $150,000 in its Series A, putting a reported $250,000 into Hugging Face during its early stages.
That investment is now drawing attention because Nvidia has reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.
If the acquisition closes at that valuation, Durant’s early stake could be worth more than $60 million, according to Pompliano’s estimate.
When Durant first backed Hugging Face, the company looked very different from the AI infrastructure powerhouse it later became. Founded in 2016, Hugging Face originally developed a consumer chatbot before pivoting toward open-source machine learning. It eventually became one of the industry’s most important platforms for developers to share models, datasets and AI tools.
Durant also did not disappear after making his earliest investment. He and Kleiman remained connected to the company through later fundraising rounds as Hugging Face’s valuation climbed dramatically. In 2023, the company raised $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation, with Nvidia itself among the participating investors.
The potential windfall adds another notable success to Durant’s increasingly significant business portfolio. Through Thirty Five Ventures, he and Kleiman have backed companies across technology, sports, media and consumer products, turning Durant’s off-court interests into something far more substantial than the traditional athlete endorsement model.
