Hugging Face has raised a $15 million fund round led by Lux Capital. The company first constructed a mobile app that let you chitchat with an artificial BFF, a sort of chatbot for assumed boys. More recently, the startup liberated an open-source library for natural language processing applications. And that library has been massively successful.

A.Capital, Betaworks, Richard Socher, Greg Brockman, Kevin Durant and others are also participating in today’s fund round.

Hugging Face launched its original chatbot app back in early 2017. After months of handiwork, the startup wanted to prove that chatbots don’t have to be a adored command line interface for customer support.

With the app, you could generate a digital friend and verse back and forth with your comrade. And it wasn’t just about understanding what you meant — the app tried to detect your sentiments to adapt rebuts based on your feelings.

It turns out that these new technologies behind that chatbot app is solid. As Brandon Reeves from Lux Capital wrote, there’s been a ton of progress when it comes to computer vision and idol processing, but natural language processing has been lagging behind.

Hugging Face’s open-source framework Transformers has been downloaded over a million times. The Github project has amassed 19,000 adepts, proving that the open-source community thinks this is a beneficial brick to build upon. Researchers at Google, Microsoft and Facebook has been playing around with it.

Some companies even use it in make, such as challenger bank Monzo for its customer support chatbot and Microsoft Bing. You can leverage Transformers for textbook classification, datum extraction, summarization, textbook generation and conversational artificial intelligence.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to triple its headcount in New York and Paris.

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