Nvidia Increases Investment in AI Startups: 10 Best Bets So Far

There’s no doubt that Nvidia (NVDA) has been one of the biggest winners of the AI ​​boom so far. Driven by insatiable demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs), the chipmaker’s shares have soared more than 450 percent since the start of 2023. As Nvidia’s market cap and revenue have grown, so has its investment in AI startups. More than half of the company’s startup investments since 2005 have come in the past two years.

The company’s startup investments reportedly totaled more than $1.5 billion as of early 2024, up significantly from $300 million a year earlier. The chipmaker has participated in more than ten funding rounds worth more than $100 million for AI startups in 2024 alone, according to data from Crunchbase, and has backed more than 50 startups since 2023. That’s not to mention a flurry of activity from the company’s venture capital arm NVentures, which separately made 26 investments in 2023 and 2024.

Nvidia seemingly unfazed The company’s upward trajectory came to a halt yesterday (September 3) after reports emerged that it had received a subpoena from the U.S. Department of Justice as part of an antitrust investigation. Shares in the company fell nearly 10 percent, shaving $279 billion less than its current market capitalization of $2.6 trillion.

But the falling stock price doesn’t mean the company is slowing down in the startup department. In addition to eyeing up an investment in an upcoming funding round in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Nvidia yesterday revealed its stake in a $100 million-plus funding round for Tokyo-based Sakana AI, a company that specializes in accessible AI models trained on small datasets.

“We invest in these companies because they’re amazing at what they do,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told Wired earlier this year. “These are some of the best minds in the world.”

From humanoid robot companies to autonomous vehicles, here are some of Nvidia’s most notable startup investments:

Perplexity AI

Huang has made no secret of his love for Perplexity AI, an AI-powered search engine positioned as a competitor to the likes of Google. According to Huang’s interview with Wired, the Nvidia CEO uses the startup’s tool almost every day for research.

He also backed up his words with actions, as Nvidia took part in a $62.7 million funding round for Perplexity AI in April that valued the startup at $1 billion. The round, led by investor Daniel Gross, included participants like Amazon’s ( AMZN ) Jeff Bezos. It wasn’t the first time Nvidia had backed the company — the chipmaker also invested in Perplexity AI in another funding round in January that valued the startup at $73.6 million.

Face hugging

Hugging Face, a startup that provides open-source AI development platforms, has long had close ties to Nvidia. The chipmaker participated in Hugging Face’s $235 million funding round in August 2023, which valued the company at $4.5 billion. Other corporate investors in the round included Google, Amazon, Intel, AMD, and Salesforce.

Hugging Face previously included Nvidia hardware among its shared resources. In May, it launched a new program that gave away $10 million in free, shared Nvidia GPUs for use by AI developers.

Capable artificial intelligence

Unlike more well-known AI assistants from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, Adept AI’s core product isn’t focused on generating text or images. Instead, the startup is focused on creating an assistant that can perform tasks on a computer, like generating reports or navigating the web, and is able to use software tools. Nvidia is on board, having participated in a $350 million funding round in March 2023.

Data blocks

After receiving a whopping $43 billion valuation last fall, Databricks has become one of the most valuable AI companies in the world. The data analytics software provider, not surprisingly, uses Nvidia GPUs and is backed by the chipmaker, along with other investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Capital One Ventures, which all participated in a $500 million funding round in September 2023. “Databricks is doing incredible work with Nvidia technology to accelerate data processing and generative AI models,” Huang said in a statement at the time.

Cohere

A formidable challenger to OpenAI and Anthropic, Canadian startup Cohere specializes in enterprise AI models. The company’s growth over the past five years has attracted investors like Nvidia, Salesforce, and Cisco, which funded Cohere in a funding round in July. Nvidia also participated in a funding round in May 2023 that raised about $270 million for the startup.

Mistral AI

Mistral AI is a French startup focused on developing open-source AI models. It was founded by former Google employees DeepMind and Meta in April 2023. Nvidia participated in two rounds of fundraising for the startup, a $518 million round in June and a $426 million round in December 2023. The collaboration between the two companies doesn’t end there – in July, Nvidia and Mistral AI jointly released a small and accessible language model for developers.

Character

Huang has long said that AI-powered robots that can work alongside humans will be the next wave of technology. It’s no surprise then that Nvidia is a backer of Figure, a startup that develops humanoid robots for use in warehousing, transportation, and retail. Nvidia reportedly gave the company $50 million in a February funding round that raised a total of $675 million, with participants including Bezos and Microsoft.

AI scale

To properly train AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, tech companies need huge amounts of data. That’s where AI startups like Scale AI come in, which provides tons of precisely labeled data and is led by billionaire Alexander Wang. Nvidia participated in a $1 billion funding round for the company in May, alongside big tech players like Amazon and Meta.

Way

Autonomous driving is another area of ​​interest for AI leaders in the tech world. Huang himself said that “every car will one day have to have autonomous capabilities” in a recent interview with Yahoo Finance. One startup leading this wave is the UK’s Wayve. Nvidia participated in a $1 billion funding round in the startup in May.

AI Variation

Of the 92 startups Nvidia has backed over the decades, Huang’s company has been a lead investor in only 20 rounds. One of those came in June 2023, when Nvidia led a stunning $1.3 billion round for Inflection AI. The chipmaker co-led the round along with Microsoft, Bill Gates, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

The AI ​​startup, co-founded by LinkedIn (LNKD) co-founder Reid Hoffman and Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, which was recently valued at $4 billion, makes a chatbot known as Pi. The majority of the round went toward beefing up Inflection AI’s compute cluster of 22,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs.