No corporation has harnessed the momentum of the artificial intelligence revolution as forcefully or as profitably as Nvidia. Over the past two years—following the groundbreaking public release of ChatGPT and the subsequent proliferation of competing generative AI platforms—the company has witnessed an extraordinary surge in nearly every financial metric imaginable. Revenue streams have multiplied, profit margins have widened dramatically, and cash reserves have grown to monumental proportions. This unprecedented financial ascent has also been mirrored by a meteoric rise in market capitalization, elevating Nvidia into the elite sphere of companies valued at an astonishing $4.5 trillion. Once known primarily as the premier manufacturer of high-performance GPUs, Nvidia has evolved into a cornerstone of the global AI economy, directing not only the hardware backbone of innovation but also the strategic capital shaping its future.
Emboldened by its surging balance sheet, the company has deployed its expanding financial might to make aggressive investments in startup ecosystems—chiefly those that operate in the artificial intelligence sector. According to data compiled by PitchBook, Nvidia has already participated in fifty venture capital transactions during 2025 alone, a figure that has surpassed the total of forty-eight investments completed throughout 2024. These totals, importantly, do not even include the portfolio of its official corporate venture capital division, NVentures. That arm has also markedly accelerated its investment cadence, culminating in twenty-one deals this year compared with a single one just three years prior. Nvidia has made it explicitly clear that its overarching strategy is not simply financial gain but rather the deliberate cultivation and amplification of the AI ecosystem. Through direct capital commitments, it aims to empower startups it perceives as ‘game changers’—entities capable of redefining markets, technologies, and industrial boundaries.
The breadth of Nvidia’s influence becomes even more apparent when examining the extensive roster of firms it has funded, each raising rounds surpassing the hundred-million-dollar threshold since 2023. The following compilation, ordered by the magnitude of capital raised, demonstrates how widely the company’s strategic investments now extend across the global technology landscape, far beyond its role as a hardware supplier to a position of entrenched industry leadership.
At the pinnacle of these ventures sits its involvement with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Nvidia first invested in the company in late 2024, contributing roughly one hundred million dollars to an immense six-point-six-billion-dollar financing round that valued OpenAI at approximately one hundred fifty-seven billion. While Nvidia’s contribution was modest in proportion to OpenAI’s larger backers—most notably Thrive, which reportedly poured in over a billion dollars—it nevertheless marked the beginning of a consequential partnership. Although Nvidia did not engage in OpenAI’s subsequent forty-billion-dollar funding earlier in 2025, the company publicly committed in September to a potential strategic allocation of up to one hundred billion dollars over time. This investment is structured around a long-term partnership aimed at scaling and deploying global AI infrastructure at yet-unseen levels.
Nvidia’s investment reach extends further to Elon Musk’s xAI, another major player in the generative AI arms race. Despite OpenAI’s attempt to dissuade its own investors from backing rivals, Nvidia joined xAI’s six-billion-dollar round in December 2024 and is expected to contribute as much as two billion more in equity as part of a twenty-billion-dollar financing effort designed to facilitate xAI’s large-scale acquisition of Nvidia’s own computing hardware—an arrangement both commercially and strategically symbiotic.
Its third substantial foray this year involved Mistral AI, a French-based developer focused on large language models. Nvidia’s third consecutive investment in the company helped close a €1.7 billion (approximately two-billion-dollar) Series C round, bringing Mistral’s post-money valuation to around €11.7 billion ($13.5 billion). The funding underscores Nvidia’s broader international commitment to advancing diverse and regionally significant AI architectures.
The pattern continues with Reflection AI, an American startup founded just one year earlier, where Nvidia spearheaded a two-billion-dollar fundraising round that valued the company at eight billion. Reflection AI aims to provide a cost-efficient, U.S.-based counterpart to China’s DeepSeek, which has gained prominence through its open-source models that contrast with the closed, proprietary systems of other AI leaders like Anthropic and OpenAI.
Among newer initiatives captivating investor attention is Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. In July 2025, the company announced a seed round of two billion dollars valuing it at twelve billion, with Nvidia listed among its major early supporters—signaling confidence in emerging AI trailblazers with seasoned technical leadership.
Earlier endeavors such as Inflection AI illustrate both the risks and evolving dynamics of Nvidia’s venture strategy. The chipmaker led a one-point-three-billion-dollar round in June 2023 for the company co-founded by Mustafa Suleyman of DeepMind fame. Less than a year later, Microsoft effectively absorbed Inflection’s founders, acquiring non-exclusive rights to its technology for $620 million and leaving the remainder of the startup in a precarious transition—a reminder that innovation ecosystems often mutate faster than corporate partnerships.
Another case exemplifying Nvidia’s diverse portfolio is Nscale, which secured a 1.1-billion-dollar round in September 2024 followed by an additional $433 million SAFE round in October, granting investors future equity stakes. Emerging from a spin-off of Akorn Energy, Nscale now builds advanced data centers across the UK and Norway designed to support OpenAI’s massive “Stargate” project.
Nvidia has also advanced into the autonomous driving domain, taking part in a $1.05 billion round for Wayve, a U.K.-based startup developing self-learning systems for autonomous vehicles. Reports indicate the company may contribute an additional half-billion dollars, underlining Nvidia’s belief in the convergence between AI and transportation. Similarly, Nvidia’s participation in Figure AI’s over one-billion-dollar Series C in 2024—after having initially invested during a $675 million Series B earlier that same year—places it within the rapidly advancing field of humanoid robotics, where Figure is now valued at an impressive $39 billion.
Nvidia’s scope of investments traverses a broad spectrum—from foundational data infrastructure ventures to experimental robotics startups and applied AI platforms. Its one-billion-dollar collaboration with Scale AI, a data-labeling company essential to model training pipelines, highlights its strategy of reinforcing the supply chain underpinning AI development. Scale AI’s valuation soared to nearly $14 billion, and subsequent restructuring saw giants like Meta acquire a near-majority stake, further intertwining Nvidia’s ecosystem with Big Tech’s strategic ambitions.
Beyond the billion-dollar rounds lies a secondary cohort of companies raising hundreds of millions, each integral to Nvidia’s ecosystemic expansion. Investments such as the $863 million backing of Commonwealth Fusion in August 2025 signal interest in energy technologies necessary for powering future data operations. Similarly, Nvidia’s role in Crusoe Energy’s $686 million round—focused on constructing data centers to lease to AI powerhouses like Oracle and Microsoft—extends its influence into the physical backbone of digital computation.
Other recipients include Cohere, the Toronto-based LLM specialist, which secured $500 million in a Series D at a valuation nearing $7 billion, and Perplexity, the AI-driven search platform whose valuations have climbed from $18 to $20 billion through continuous Nvidia support. Investments in Poolside and Lambda, both valued between $2.5 and $3 billion, strengthen Nvidia’s position in AI coding assistance and GPU cloud provisioning respectively. Notably, Nvidia invested early in CoreWeave—now a public entity—demonstrating the continuity between its startup engagement and long-term strategic partnerships.
Further notable ventures include Together AI’s $305 million Series B, Firmus Technologies’ $215 million energy-efficient data center project in Tasmania, and Sakana AI’s $214 million Series A in Japan focusing on cost-efficient AI model training. Complementing these, Nuro’s $203 million round for autonomous delivery vehicles and Imbue’s $200 million funding for reasoning AI research showcase Nvidia’s multifaceted engagement across domains.
Finally, a cluster of additional investments exceeding $100 million each—spanning Ayar Labs (optical interconnect technology), Kore.ai (enterprise chatbot platforms), Sandbox AQ (quantitative computing models), Hippocratic AI (healthcare-focused LLMs), Weka (data management infrastructure), Runway (generative media tools), Bright Machines (intelligent robotics), Enfabrica (networking chips), and Reka AI (research-focused laboratories)—underscores Nvidia’s persistent ambition to populate every layer of the AI technology stack. Each commitment, though distinct in scope and region, reinforces a unified strategy: to integrate Nvidia’s hardware, intellectual capital, and financial influence into the connective tissue of artificial intelligence’s ongoing global development.
Through this expansive network of partnerships and investments, Nvidia has effectively transformed itself from a component supplier into an innovation orchestrator—one whose influence shapes the evolution of entire industries. The extent of its reach, both financial and technological, vividly illustrates how deeply the company’s strategies penetrate into every corner of the AI revolution, securing its position not only as a beneficiary of AI’s growth but as one of its most critical architects.
Sourse: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/12/nvidias-ai-empire-a-look-at-its-top-startup-investments/
