Angel investors have earned a 1000-fold return.

A staggering return has emerged.

It all starts with a merger and acquisition deal: NVIDIA will acquire the well-known AI community Hugging Face for 12.9 billion US dollars (approximately 86.7 billion RMB). Founded jointly by three young French people ten years ago, the founders achieved financial freedom overnight as a result.

Looking through the shareholder list, an unexpected figure also comes to light — NBA star Kevin Durant. In his early years, he participated in Hugging Face's seed round through the venture capital institution Thirty Five Ventures, and continued to increase his stake afterwards. Calculated accordingly, the return of that earliest angel round exceeded 1000 times.

Looking along this line, myths in the AI sector keep emerging. The wealth wave has arrived so overwhelmingly and concentratedly from the future.

Invested in the angel round 8 years ago

The earliest return hit 1000 times

This is a brilliant move in the history of athlete investment.

Back in 2018, Durant participated in Hugging Face's angel round financing through Thirty Five Ventures (35V), a venture capital firm he co-founded with his business partner Rich Kleiman, with an investment amount of 100,000 US dollars.

According to statistics from well-known overseas bloggers, the angel investors in this round, including Betaworks, Durant's Thirty Five Ventures, and Thibaud Elziere, have achieved an overall return of more than 1000 times.

After that, Durant added another 150,000 US dollars in the Series A round in 2019, with a total investment of 250,000 US dollars.

Usually, subsequent shares will be diluted to some extent. According to the calculation of Joe Pompliano, a sports business media figure, the total revenue of Durant's Thirty Five Ventures from this investment will exceed 60 million US dollars, generating a return of about 240 times.

Durant's annual salary with the Rockets in the 2026-2027 season is 43.9 million US dollars. In other words, the 250,000 US dollars that was only equivalent to a few days of his salary back now earns back more than a full year's maximum salary.

At the age of 37, Durant has stepped into the twilight of his career, but his investment map may have just started. Unlike many star players of his generation who prefer to make layouts in brands, media, consumption and other fields, his venture capital path seems quite hardcore.

As early as 2010, the fledgling Durant said on social media that instead of wasting time in clubs, he might as well put his money and energy into investments. After that, he co-founded the venture capital firm Thirty Five Ventures with his partner Rich Kleiman, which has invested in more than 100 start-ups so far.

Even in the Silicon Valley VC circle, this investment portfolio is quite luxurious — including the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, giant sports wearable device brand Whoop, banking service platform Mercury and so on. Most of them entered the market at the early stage and accompanied the companies all the way to the peak.

At present, whether on or off the court, Durant can be regarded as a top-tier wealthy figure. Not long ago, he completed a two-year 90 million US dollar contract extension with the Rockets, and his total career salary reached 591.1 million US dollars, surpassing LeBron James to officially become the new all-time total salary leader in NBA history.

His endorsement map is also huge. As early as 2023, he signed a lifetime contract with Nike, and also holds endorsement contracts for brands such as Fanatics, Prime, and Gatorade. According to Forbes statistics, Durant's total income from salary and endorsements this season is as high as 103.3 million US dollars, second only to James and Curry among all NBA players.

Acquired by Jensen Huang

A group of people achieved financial freedom

The winners are far more than that.

In 2016, three young French people Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf hit it off immediately and founded the AI chatbot company Hugging Face, with the goal of "talking to AI like in science fiction novels".

Clément Delangue, born in a small town in France in 1990, started selling imported cars on eBay at the age of 17, then went to study at ESCP Business School in Paris, and later founded Hugging Face after several transitions.

Hugging Face was originally positioned for the youth group, allowing users to share computer-generated face selfies, tell jokes, and gossip about their obsession with Siri, but unfortunately it could hardly make much money. However, in order to train the chatbot to understand languages, the team created a underlying library for machine learning models that can detect emotions in text information and generate reasonable responses.

No one expected that business opportunities were hidden here.

In 2018, the team open sourced part of the code framework Transformers for free. This open source library that allows AI researchers to use directly immediately detonated the developer community. "We didn't think too much when we released it." Even Delangue himself was surprised.

Soon, Transformers exceeded 100,000 stars on GitHub. Realizing the value of the open source platform, Hugging Face began to transform, helping enterprises manage private models and host APIs. Almost all AI developers around the world cannot bypass it when they want to download models, find data sets or run demos.

Up to now, Hugging Face has grown into the "public utility infrastructure" in the AI circle, gathering more than 3 million models and 1 million data sets. Popular open source models including OpenAI, Meta, Google, Alibaba, DeepSeek, Zhipu and others all take Hugging Face as an important distribution channel.

Its valuation keeps rising. Public information shows that Hugging Face has completed 6 rounds of financing so far, with a total financing amount of 395 million US dollars (approximately 2.6 billion RMB), and its valuation reached 4.5 billion US dollars in the latest round, with tech giants including Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD and Salesforce participating in the investment.

In the 2024 French top 500 rich list selected by the magazine Challenges, the co-founders of Hugging Face stood out with a net worth of 625 million euros, when the company's valuation was about 2 billion euros.

Now after the acquisition, the massive wealth can be cashed out.

Nothing is more attractive than AI

The wealth creation wave

We are currently experiencing the AI-driven wealth creation wave.

The AI companies standing at the center of the stage are often only a few years old, but their market value has soared rapidly as they caught the industry trend.

For example, Scale AI, a data labeling company co-founded by two post-90s generation Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo, was acquired by Meta at a consideration of nearly 15 billion US dollars. The co-founder Lucy Guo immediately became one of the youngest self-made female billionaires in the world.

As for OpenAI, it only took about 5 years to reach a trillion-dollar valuation. At the end of last year, more than 600 OpenAI employees cashed out a total of 6.6 billion US dollars through an internal secondary market stock sale, of which about 75 employees got the upper limit of 30 million US dollars per person for cashing out.

Anthropic, founded by the Amodei siblings who left OpenAI, has also attracted widespread attention. In just five years, it has become the most expensive AI unicorn in the world. The latest news shows that investors have given it an estimated listing valuation of 2 trillion US dollars — higher than the 1.77 trillion US dollars of Elon Musk's SpaceX before its listing. By then, all employees of Anthropic will witness the moment of super high returns.

Looking back at China, the similar scene is equally inspiring.

Take Zhipu as an example. It successfully landed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January this year, and its stock price has risen by more than 10 times afterwards. Even after several pullbacks, its market value still remains stable at 500 billion Hong Kong dollars. Half of its employees hold shares of the company, and rough calculation shows that the per capita market value of their shareholding exceeds 10 million Hong Kong dollars.

Current AI enterprises generally allocate a larger proportion of equity to ordinary employees. As a result, a large number of young engineers and researchers have completed the leap of fate in just a few years, writing the wealth promotion path that ordinary employees dream of.

The wealth wave is still spreading quietly.

Many people have not reacted yet, the stock prices of companies such as Innolight, Accelink Technologies, Source Photonics, Linktek Instrument and Biwin Storage have hit new highs this year one after another, with market values often reaching hundreds of billions or trillions.

Just not long ago, the vesting conditions of multiple phases of equity incentive plans of Innolight were met. If there is no overlap between the incentive targets, 803 employees of Innolight will be able to vest 1.63 million shares, which are worth more than 1.7 billion yuan calculated at the stock price at that time.

Looking back at the mobile Internet era, if ordinary employees wanted to achieve wealth leap through options, they often needed to accompany the company through a long cycle of 8 to 10 years, go through multiple rounds of reshuffles, and wait for the moment when the listing bell rings.

But in the AI track, this cycle has been greatly shortened. The rapid aggregation of capital, technology and talents makes the equity value in the hands of early employees increase several times or even dozens of times in just two or three years.

The wealth train of the era has never been so fast.

This article is from the WeChat official account "PE Daily" (ID: pedaily2012), the author is Yu Mengying, and 36Kr publishes it with authorization.