Nvidia’s Been Busy

Chris Metinko

While Thursday was supposed to be all about Arm’s IPO, another chipmaker seemed unwilling to let all it have all the buzz.

Nvidia — which joined the $1 trillion market cap club this spring — joined Databricks‘ $500 million-plus Series I led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates. The deal values the startup at $43 billion.

However, that is far from the only deal the AI chipmaking darling has participated in recently, as Nvidia has become one of the leading investors in all things AI.

In the current third quarter, Nvidia has participated in 11 funding deals — the majority in AI-related startups — per Crunchbase data. In Q2, the company made eight such deals.

Before those two quarters, Nvidia had not made more than four deals in any quarter dating back to at least 2005, per Crunchbase.

Just in the last few weeks Nvidia has participated in:

The $125 million Series B for Mountain View, California-based Enfabrica, which designs networking chips to handle AI workloads.
San Francisco-based Imbue’s massive $200 million Series B that valued the AI research lab at $1 billion.
Israel-based AI startup AI21 Labs’ $155 million Series C. The startup competes with generative AI powerhouses OpenAI and Anthropic.
New York-based Hugging Face’s $200 million round at a whopping $4 billion valuation. The startup allows companies to store and use AI software. It hosts hundreds of thousands of open-source AI models that developers can use for AI applications.

Numbers going up

While many big-name firms like Tiger Global and Coatue are pulling back on their deal numbers, Nvidia is picking up the pace — at least when it comes to AI.

Nvidia is leading the charge for chips with better processing to train large language models for AI and it seems to stay ahead by keeping its finger on the pulse of innovation.

Some of the other largest deals Nvidia participated in all have come this calendar year and include:

Adept AI’s $350 million Series B in March that gave the San Francisco-based startup a post-money valuation of at least $1 billion. Adept is developing AI models that cannot just respond to text commands — like a chatbot — but actually turn that command into actions. In theory, the company’s generative AI could help users do tasks from browsing the internet to navigating enterprise software tools.
Toronto-based Cohere’s $270 million round in May. The startup’s AI platform competes with OpenAI.
Drone startup Skydio’s $230 million Series E at a $2.2 billion valuation in February.

While it is not known what Nvidia invested in any of these deals — cash, stock, technology and services or even a combination of all three — it is clear Nvidia has a desire to be not just a big player in AI, but the dominant player.