Nvidia's $12.9B Deal to Buy Hugging Face May Have Made Kevin Durant $60M: Inside the NBA Star's Portfolio

Nvidia has reportedly agreed to buy the artificial intelligence (AI) platform Hugging Face for $12.9B (£9.5B), according to a report on Wednesday night. One of those who could benefit is NBA star Kevin Durant, an early backer of the company. A widely shared post says the deal could turn the $250,000 (£183,000) he reportedly invested into more than $60M (£44M). Neither company has confirmed the deal, and nobody has said how much Durant put in.

Durant invested early, and the timing is the point. A seed round is one of the first times a startup raises money, typically while the company is still building its product and business. Later rounds, called Series A and Series B, raise more and dilute the earlier backers, whose slice of the company gets smaller each time. What an early backer gets depends on the cheque size, the dilution that followed, and the terms of the sale.

Where the $60M Figure Came From

Nvidia's reported purchase has not been completed. The Information reported that Nvidia had agreed to buy Hugging Face; Business Insider reported that nothing had been signed. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face has commented, and TechCrunch said that silence was unusual for Nvidia. Until it closes, any payout to shareholders is hypothetical.

Joe Pompliano, who writes about the business side of sport, produced the $60M estimate. He said Durant invested in the seed round and the Series A with Rich Kleiman, his longtime manager and the co-founder of their firm, Thirty Five Ventures. Pompliano put the two amounts at $100,000 (£73,300) and $150,000 (£110,000). The $250,000 now circulating comes from adding those together.

Pompliano's wording matters. He said he was told the amounts and estimated that Durant had likely made more than $60M on the investment. Durant and Kleiman have never confirmed the figures themselves, and Thirty Five Ventures does not disclose individual investments. The $60M rests on two cheque sizes that have not been independently confirmed.

Repetition did the rest. Polymarket, a website where people bet on real-world events, repeated it as news, combining the two cheques into a single $250,000 figure and calling it a gain of nearly 24,000%. Polymarket's own post used the word 'reportedly'. On those numbers, $250,000 turning into $60M is 240 times the money.

What public reporting confirms is that Durant invested, not how much he paid. TechCrunch reported that he joined Hugging Face's seed round in May 2018 and invested again in the Series A of December 2019. He was in the Series B of March 2021 with Kleiman, and Hugging Face listed both as existing investors in its Series C of May 2022. None of those reports says how much he put in.

Nvidia was already an investor. Salesforce Ventures led a $235M (£172M) round in August 2023 that valued Hugging Face at $4.5B (£3.3B). Nvidia took part in that round. The company has never said how much it put in, or how much of Hugging Face it got, so outsiders cannot price that holding.

Nvidia has tried before. The Financial Times reported in January that Hugging Face turned down a $500M (£367M) Nvidia investment that would have valued it at $7B (£5.1B). Hugging Face did not want one investor to have too much influence, according to that report. That offer was rejected. Nvidia is now reported to be buying Hugging Face outright.

Inside Durant's Portfolio

Durant and Kleiman set up Thirty Five Ventures in 2016, naming it after the number Durant wore for most of his career. Kleiman is his longtime manager as well as his business partner. The firm says its portfolio runs to more than 100 early-stage companies, among them Coinbase and Robinhood. Hugging Face is one of many.

The possible payout is easier to grasp beside Durant's day job. He is 37, plays for the Houston Rockets, and is expected to earn $43.9M (£32.2M) in 2026-27. If the $60M estimate is close, one early cheque would be worth more than a full season's pay. That is the comparison being shared.

Durant's early investment is well documented from 2018 onward. What is not known is how much he invested, or what share of the company he got, because neither has been made public. The reported deal has not closed either. Until that changes, the $60M is an estimate rather than a payout.