Thomas Wolf

Thomas Wolf angel-invested in Rivan's £25m Project Steadfast round on 20 April 2026, contributing to Europe's largest planned synthetic natural gas facility in Wiltshire alongside IQ Capital, Plural, Matt Clifford, and Markus Villig. Wolf's participation illustrates a crossover thesis: AI infrastructure demands enormous energy, and the researchers building that infrastructure are now backing the energy-transition companies needed to supply it.

Wolf is co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, the leading open-source AI and machine learning platform. With a background in physics and signal processing, he joined co-founders Clément Delangue and Julien Chaumond in building Hugging Face into the central library for open-source ML models, datasets, and applications. The platform hosts hundreds of thousands of models and is used by researchers and companies worldwide; its Transformers library became the de facto standard for large-language model development.

Wolf's move into Energy infrastructure is consistent with a broader pattern among European AI founders who are confronting the resource constraints of their own sector. Rivan's SNG technology, which converts renewable electricity and captured CO₂ into pipeline-compatible gas, directly addresses the hard-to-abate industrial heat demand that electric grids alone cannot yet meet.