Nvidia is the world’s undisputed leading provider of chips and GPUs. And over the past year, they’ve quietly been on a relentless pursuit of betting on promising startups. But, why?
What’s happening:
- Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) continues to pour capital into early stage bets on startups across healthcare, drug discovery, robotics and more
- Through their venture capital arm, NVentures, Nvidia has recently become one of the most prominent players in the venture capital ecosystem
Why it matters:
- While Nvidia’s venture capital arm has made numerous notable investments into leading artificial intelligence companies such as CoreWeave, Hugging Face and Ayar Labs, they’ve also been making bets on startups on the leading edge of numerous other spaces where there are promising new applications for AI
Who is making moves:
- Moon Surgical, a startup using artificial intelligence to build robotics for laparoscopic surgery, landed Nvidia as an investor in their Series A financing round
- Superliminal Medicines, a startup aiming to rapidly accelerate the development of new therapeutics through using artificial intelligence for drug discovery, saw Nvidia lead their seed round alongside RA Capital Management and Insight Partners
- Machina Labs, a startup using artificial intelligence to reinvent how manufacturing is done, brought in Nvidia as the co-lead for their Series B financing round alongside of Innovation Endeavours
- Seurat Technologies, a 3D metal printing company leveraging artificial intelligence technology, saw Nvidia co-lead their Series C raise with Capricorn's Technology Impact Fund
Going deeper:
- Aside from getting future upside on early disrupters and potentially innovative companies through their investments, Nvidia has positioned themselves to be the exclusive supplier of GPUs to power artificial intelligence workloads and compute to all of their portfolio companies
- This unique dynamic has created even more exponential growth for Nvidia’s core business of selling hardware and chips, as all of their portfolio companies have a deep need to train large language models or generative AI models
By the numbers:
- Nvidia has invested in more than 19 different startups this past year, marking their most active year of venture capital investments ever
- The average investment from Nvidia into a startup has ranged widely between $1M-$50M USD
