An Overview of the Startups in Which Nvidia Holds a Stake

Few companies have benefited from the surge in AI as visibly as Nvidia. Since generative AI tools entered the mainstream more than three years ago, demand for the company’s chips has surged, pushing revenue, margins, and cash holdings to record levels. Investors have followed suit, sending Nvidia’s share price sharply higher and lifting its market value to $4.6 trillion. 

Beyond supplying hardware, Nvidia has steadily expanded its presence as an investor, placing bets on a wide range of startups tied to AI, advanced computing, robotics, energy, and infrastructure. 

According to data from PitchBook, Nvidia took part in close to 67 venture deals in 2025, exceeding the total number it completed in 2024. These figures do not include investments made through its formal venture arm, NVentures, which has also accelerated its activity. PitchBook reports that NVentures participated in 30 transactions this year, compared with just one deal in 2022. 

The company has stated that its corporate investing strategy is designed to strengthen the broader AI landscape by supporting companies it believes can shape new markets or redefine existing ones. The scope of those investments shows how widely the company has extended its reach. 

At the top end are a handful of enormous funding rounds involving some of the most closely watched names in AI. Nvidia became a first-time backer of OpenAI in late 2024, contributing $100 million to a multibillion-dollar raise that valued the ChatGPT creator at well over $150 billion. While Nvidia’s check was modest compared with other participants, the relationship signaled a deeper strategic alignment around large-scale AI infrastructure. 

The chipmaker has also committed billions to Anthropic through a strategic agreement that ties capital investment to long-term purchases of cloud computing and future Nvidia systems. The company has taken similar positions in fast-growing AI application companies. It joined the $2.3 billion Series D for Cursor, an AI coding assistant whose valuation jumped to more than $29 billion. 

Nvidia has also backed Elon Musk’s xAI, France-based Mistral AI, and Thinking Machines Lab, the startup founded by former OpenAI technology chief Mira Murati. 

Infrastructure has been another major focus. Nvidia has backed data center developers like Crusoe and Nscale, both of which are involved in building massive facilities intended to support OpenAI’s Stargate project in the United States and Europe. Investments in CoreWeave, Lambda, and Together AI further underscore Nvidia’s interest in cloud platforms built around its GPUs. 

Beyond AI software and infrastructure, Nvidia has placed sizable bets in adjacent fields. These include autonomous driving startups such as Wayve, Waabi, and Nuro; robotics firms like Bright Machines; and data-focused companies including Scale AI and Weka. In energy and science, Nvidia has invested in Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which is pursuing commercial nuclear fusion, and Sandbox AQ, which develops large quantitative models for complex analysis. 

Many of Nvidia’s investments fall into the hundreds of millions of dollars range rather than the headline-grabbing multibillion-dollar rounds. Companies such as Cohere, Perplexity, Poolside, Black Forest Labs, Uniphore, Sakana AI, and Imbue all raised substantial capital with Nvidia among their backers. In several cases, the chipmaker has participated across multiple funding rounds, signaling longer-term commitments. 

There have also been less conventional outcomes. Inflection AI, an early Nvidia-backed startup, saw its founders and much of its talent hired away by Microsoft less than a year after a major raise, leaving the company with a narrower mission. 

As the AI landscape rapidly evolves, the range of innovative solutions coming from firms like Datavault AI Inc. (NASDAQ: DVLT) is bound to broaden equally fast as large corporations like Nvidia seek out additional ecosystem players to back. 

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