No company has leveraged the AI revolution more dramatically than Nvidia. Since ChatGPT was introduced nearly two years ago, sales, profitability, and cash reserves have soared, as have many competitive generative AI services launched since then. And the stock price soared more than eight times.
During that time, the world’s leading high-performance GPU manufacturers have used their swelling wealth to significantly increase their investments in startups of all kinds, especially AI startups.
The chip giant expanded its venture capital activity in 2024, participating in 49 funding rounds for AI companies, up from 34 in 2023, according to PitchBook data. This is a dramatic jump in investment compared to the previous four years combined, when Nvidia only funded 38 AI deals. These investments exclude those from NVentures, a formal corporate VC fund that has significantly increased its investments over the past two years. (NVentures was involved in 24 deals in 2024, compared with just two in 2022, according to PitchBook.)
Nvidia said the goal of the company’s investment is to expand the AI ecosystem by supporting startups it sees as “game changers and market makers.”
Of course, Nvidia isn’t the only big tech company writing checks to AI startups. However, it has been most active in the past two years. According to PitchBook data, Nvidia has participated in 83 deals over two years (2023 and 2024), compared to Alphabet’s 73, while Microsoft has participated in 40 deals.
Below is a list of startups that have raised rounds in excess of $100 million over the past two years in which Nvidia is a named participant. The rounds are organized from highest to lowest amount.
billion dollar club
Open AI: Nvidia first backed the ChatGPT maker last October, reportedly writing a $100 million check to raise a massive $6.6 billion financing that valued the company at $157 billion. The chipmaker’s investment was dwarfed by OpenAI’s other backers, most notably Thrive, which invested $1.3 billion, according to the New York Times.
xAI: Nvidia participated in Elon Musk’s $6 billion xAI round. The deal shows that some of OpenAI’s investors did not comply with requests to refrain from supporting direct competitors. Nvidia joined xAI’s cap table a few months later after investing in the ChatGPT maker in October.
refraction: One of Nvidia’s first significant AI investments had one of its most unusual results. In June 2023, Nvidia was one of several major investors who participated in a $1.3 billion round in Inflection, a company founded by Mustafa Suleyman, who previously founded DeepMind. Less than a year later, Microsoft hired the founders of Inflection AI and paid $620 million to license the technology non-exclusively, leaving the company with a significantly reduced workforce and an uncertain future.
wave: Last May, Nvidia participated in a $1.05 billion investment round in a UK-based startup developing a self-learning system for autonomous driving. The company is testing the vehicle in the UK and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Safe Superintelligence: Last September, Nvidia was a backer of a new startup founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. The $1 billion round reportedly values the new 10-person AI lab at $5 billion.
AI scale: In May 2024, Nvidia joined Accel and other tech giants Amazon and Meta in investing $1 billion in Scale AI, which provides data labeling services to enterprises to train AI models. The round valued the San Francisco-based company at nearly $14 billion.
Club worth hundreds of millions of dollars
Crusoe: The startup’s building data center, which will reportedly lease to Oracle, Microsoft and OpenAI, raised $686 million in late November, according to an SEC filing. The investment was led by Founders Fund and included Nvidia among other investors.
Picture AI: In February AI robotics startup Figure has raised $675 million in Series B funding from Nvidia, OpenAI Startup Fund, Microsoft, and others. The round valued the company at $2.6 billion.
Mistral AI: Nvidia made its second investment in Mistral, with the France-based large language model developer raising a $640 million Series B in June at a $6 billion valuation.
cohesion: In June, Nvidia invested in a $500 million round in Cohere, a large-scale language model provider serving enterprises. The chipmaker first backed the Toronto-based startup a year ago.
embarrassment: Nvidia first invested in Perplexity in November 2023 and has participated in all of the AI search engine startup’s subsequent rounds, including a $500 million round in December that valued the company at $9 billion, according to PitchBook data.
Poolside: In October AI Coding assistance startup Poolside announced that it has raised $500 million in funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. NVIDIA participated in this round and valued the AI startup at $3 billion.
Coreweave: Nvidia invested in the AI cloud computing provider in April 2023, when CoreWeave raised $221 million in funding. CoreWeave’s valuation has since surged from about $2 billion to $19 billion, and the company is reportedly targeting a $35 billion IPO this year. CoreWeave allows customers to rent Nvidia GPUs by the hour.
AI sector: Last September, Nvidia that A Japan-based startup that trains low-cost generative AI models using small datasets. The startup raised a massive Series A round worth about $214 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion.
injection: AI Research Institute It claims to develop AI systems that can reason and code, and raised $200 million in September 2023 from investors including Nvidia, Astera Institute and former Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt.
reference: Last June, the self-driving truck startup raised a $200 million Series B round co-led by existing investors Uber and Khosla Ventures. Other investors include Nvidia, Volvo Group Venture Capital and Porsche Automobil Holding SE.
Transactions worth over $100 million
Laboratory setup: In December, Nvidia invested $155 million in Ayar Labs. A company developing optical interconnects to improve AI computing and power efficiency. This is the third time that NVIDIA has supported a startup.
KOREAI: The startup developing enterprise-focused AI chatbots raised $150 million in December 2023. In addition to Nvidia, investors who participated in the financing included FTV Capital, Vistara Growth, and Sweetwater Private Equity.
Weka: Last May, Nvidia invested $140 million in AI-based data management platform Weka. The round values the Silicon Valley company at $1.6 billion.
passage: In June 2023, Runway, a startup building generative AI tools for multimedia content creators, raised $141 million in Series C expansion funding from investors including Nvidia, Google, and Salesforce.
Bright Machine: In June 2024, Nvidia participated in the $126 million Series C of Bright Machines, a smart robotics and AI-based software startup.
Massive data: The startup, which provides storage solutions for AI and data analytics, raised a $118 million Series E in December 2023 at a valuation of $9.3 billion. This was Nvidia’s third investment in Vast Data.
N Factory: In September 2023, Nvidia invested in networking chip designer Enfabrica’s $125 million Series B. Although the startup raised another $115 million in November, Nvidia did not participate in that round.
