No company has capitalized on the AI revolution more dramatically than Nvidia. Its revenue, profitability, and cash reserves have skyrocketed since the introduction of ChatGPT over two years ago — and the many competitive generative AI services that have launched since. And its stock price soared. 

During that period, the world’s leading high-performance GPU maker has used its ballooning fortunes to significantly increase investments in all sorts of startups but particularly in AI startups.

The chip giant ramped up its venture capital activity in 2024, participating in 49 funding rounds for AI companies, a sharp increase from 34 in 2023, according to PitchBook data. It’s a dramatic surge in investment compared to the previous four years combined, during which Nvidia funded only 38 AI deals. Note that these investments exclude those made by its formal corporate VC fund, NVentures, which also significantly ramped up its investing in the last two years. (PitchBook says NVentures engaged in 24 deals in 2024, compared to just 2 in 2022.) 

In 2025, Nvidia has already participated in seven rounds.

Nvidia has stated that the goal of its corporate investing is to expand the AI ecosystem by backing startups it considers to be “game changers and market makers.” 

Below is a list of startups that raised rounds exceeding $100 million where Nvidia is a named participant since 2023, including new ones it has backed so far in 2025,  organized from the highest amount to lowest raised in the round.

The billion-dollar-round club

OpenAI: Nvidia backed the ChatGPT maker for the first time in October, reportedly writing a $100 million check toward a colossal $6.6 billion round that valued the company at $157 billion. The chipmaker’s investment was dwarfed by OpenAI’s other backers, notably Thrive, which according to the New York Times invested $1.3 billion.

xAI:  Nvidia participated in the $6 billion round of Elon Musk’s xAI. The deal revealed that not all of OpenAI’s investors followed its request to refrain from backing any of its direct competitors. After investing in the ChatGPT maker in October, Nvidia joined xAI’s cap table a few months later.

Inflection:  One of Nvidia’s first significant AI investments also had one of the most unusual outcomes. In June 2023, Nvidia was one of several lead investors in Inflection’s $1.3 billion round, a company founded by Mustafa Suleyman, who earlier founded DeepMind. Less than a year later, Microsoft hired Inflection AI’s founders, paying $620 million for a non-exclusive technology license, leaving the company with a significantly diminished workforce and a less defined future.

Wayve: In May, Nvidia participated in a $1.05 billion round for the U.K.-based startup, which is developing a self-learning system for autonomous driving. The company is testing its vehicles in the U.K. and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Scale AI: In May 2024, Nvidia joined Accel and other tech giants Amazon and Meta to invest $1 billion in Scale AI, which provides data-labeling services to companies for training AI models. The round valued the San Francisco-based company at nearly $14 billion.

The many-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars club

Crusoe: A startup building data centers reportedly to be leased to Oracle, Microsoft, and OpenAI raised $686 million in late November, according to an SEC filing. The investment was led by Founders Fund, and the long list of other investors included Nvidia.

Figure AI: In February 2024, AI robotics startup Figure raised a $675 million Series B from Nvidia, OpenAI Startup Fund, Microsoft, and others. The round valued the company at $2.6 billion.

Mistral AI: Nvidia invested in Mistral for the second time when the French-based large language model developer raised a $640 million Series B at a $6 billion valuation in June.  

Lambda: AI cloud provider Lambda, which provides services for model training, raised a $480 million Series D at a reported $2.5 billion valuation in February. The round was co-led by SGW and Andra Capital Lambda, and joined by Nvidia, ARK Invest and others. A significant part of Lambda’s business involves renting servers powered by Nvidia’s GPUs.

Cohere: In June, Nvidia invested in Cohere’s $500 million round, a large language model provider serving enterprises. The chipmaker first backed the Toronto-based startup in 2023.

Perplexity: Nvidia first invested in Perplexity in November of 2023 and has participated in every subsequent round of the AI search engine startup, including the $500 million round in December, which values the company at $9 billion, according to PitchBook data.

Poolside: In October, the AI coding assistant startup Poolside announced it raised $500 million led by Bain Capital Ventures. Nvidia participated in the round, which 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. Since then, CoreWeave’s valuation has jumped from about $2 billion to $19 billion, and the company has filed for an IPO. CoreWeave allows its customers to rent Nvidia GPUs on an hourly basis.

Together AI: In February, Nvidia participated in the $305 million Series B of this company, which offers cloud-based infrastructure for building AI models. The round valued TogetherAi at $3.3 billion, and was co-led by Prosperity7, a Saudi Arabian venture firm, and General Catalyst. Nvidia backed the company for the first time in 2023. 

Sakana AI: In September, Nvidia invested in the Japan-based startup, which trains low-cost generative AI models using small datasets. The startup raised a massive Series A round of about $214 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion.

Imbue: The AI research lab that claims to be developing AI systems that can reason and code raised a $200 million round in September 2023 from investors, including Nvidia, Astera Institute, and former Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt.

Waabi: In June, the autonomous trucking startup raised a $200 million Series B round co-led by existing investors Uber and Khosla Ventures. Other investors included Nvidia, Volvo Group Venture Capital, and Porsche Automobil Holding SE.

Deals of over a $100 million

Ayar Labs: In December, Nvidia invested in the $155 million round of Ayar Labs, a company developing optical interconnects to improve AI compute and power efficiency. This was the third time Nvidia backed the startup.

Kore.ai: The startup developing enterprise-focused AI chatbots raised $150 million in December of 2023. In addition to Nvidia, investors participating in the funding included FTV Capital, Vistara Growth, and Sweetwater Private Equity.

Hippocratic AI: This startup, which is developing large language models for healthcare, announced in January that it raised a $141 million Series B at a valuation of $1.64 billion led by Kleiner Perkins. Nvidia participated in the round, along with returning investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst and others. The company claims that its AI solutions can handle non-diagnostic patient-facing tasks such as pre-operating procedures, remote patient monitoring, and appointment preparation.

Weka: In May, Nvidia invested in a $140 million round for AI-native data management platform Weka. The round valued the Silicon Valley company at $1.6 billion.

Runway:  In June of 2023, Runway, a startup building generative AI tools for multimedia content creators, raised a $141 million Series C extension from investors, including Nvidia, Google, and Salesforce.

Bright Machines: In June 2024, Nvidia participated in a $126 million Series C of Bright Machines, a smart robotics and AI-driven software startup.

Enfabrica: In September 2023, Nvidia invested in networking chips designer Enfabrica’s $125 million Series B. Although the startup raised another $115 million in November, Nvidia didn’t participate in the round.

Editor’s note: Previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Nvidia is a backer of Safe Superintelligence and an investor in Vast Data’s Series E round. Nvidia hasn’t invested in Vast Data since the company’s Series D.  

In this week’s episode of the StrictlyVC Download podcast, veteran VC Aileen Lee was direct about a major consequence of the recent boom-and-bust cycle: many companies stuck in limbo aren’t just struggling to regain their footing after raising too much money at unsustainable valuations; they’ve also lost the champions who once backed them.

Lee was discussing how limited partners hesitate to criticize powerful fund managers, fearing they’ll be shut out from investing in those firms again. But she imagined one thing they’d say if they could speak freely:

“Everybody wants to get into X brand name fund, and so they never will criticize them [for fear of repercussions] . . .they probably talk about us behind our backs [laughs].. . .But what they would say is [that] all the people who have [were] hired at these venture firms during the ZIRP era . . . they made a bunch of crappy investments” and now they are being elbowed out — except that it’s too late, observed Lee. “All [the LPs’] money basically just got thrown down the drain because the people in the venture jobs didn’t stick around long enough to see if the companies were successful.”

It’s not the fault of these newer investors, Lee continued. “Just a ton of people didn’t get trained and didn’t get any mentorship or apprenticeship were given checkbooks, and a lot of investments were made, and . . .there are a lot of orphaned companies,” as a result.

But there’s another reason startups are being left to their own devices “and I find this crazy,” said Lee; in many cases, companies have been orphaned by a more senior general partner “who led the investment – who is still there [at the firm] but just stopped showing up to the board meetings.”

For certain companies, it’s been happening for years at this point. No one did as much due diligence during the go-go Covid era of funding, and the corner cutting never quite stopped when it came to these same investments. But it’s also a key reason a growing number of companies are struggling to find outside help with exit strategies, and why LPs would be justified in voicing more frustration.

As another longtime VC, Jason Lemkin, told this editor in late 2022 when VCs first stopped showing up at the board meetings of startups that were losing momentum: “[S]houldn’t there be checks and balances? Millions and millions are invested by pension funds and universities and widows and orphans, and when you don’t do any diligence on the way in, and you don’t do continual diligence at a board meeting, you’re kind of abrogating some of your fiduciary responsibilities to your LPs, right?”

Check out StrictlyVC Download weekly; new episodes come out every Tuesday.

On Thursday, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent letters to 16 American technology firms, including Google and OpenAI, asking for past communications with the Biden administration that might suggest the former president “coerced or colluded” with companies to “censor lawful speech” in AI products.

The Trump administration’s top technology advisors previously signaled they would pick a fight with Big Tech over “AI censorship,” which is seemingly the next phase in the culture war between conservatives and Silicon Valley. Jordan previously led an investigation into whether the Biden administration and Big Tech colluded to silence conservative voices on social media platforms. Now, he’s turning his attention to AI companies — and their intermediaries.

In letters to technology executives including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Apple CEO Tim Cook, Jordan pointed to a report his committee published in December that he claims “uncovered the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to control AI to suppress speech.”

In this latest inquiry, Jordan asked Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, IBM, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability AI for information. They have until March 27 to provide it.

TechCrunch reached out to the companies for comment. Most didn’t immediately respond. Nvidia, Microsoft, and Stability AI declined to comment.

There’s one notable omission in Jordan’s list: billionaire Elon Musk’s frontier AI lab, xAI. That may be because Musk, a close Trump ally, is a tech leader who has been at the forefront of conversations about AI censorship.

The writing was on the wall that conservative lawmakers would ramp up scrutiny over alleged AI censorship. Perhaps in anticipation of an investigation such as Jordan’s, several tech companies have changed the ways their AI chatbots handle politically sensitive queries.

Earlier this year, OpenAI announced it was changing the way it trains AI models to represent more perspectives and ensure ChatGPT wasn’t censoring certain viewpoints. OpenAI denies this was an attempt to appease the Trump administration, but rather an effort to double down on the company’s core values.

Anthropic, for its part, has said that its newest AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, will refuse to answer fewer questions and give more nuanced responses on controversial subjects.

Other companies have been slower to change how their AI models treat political subject matter. Leading up to the 2024 U.S. election, Google said that its Gemini chatbot wouldn’t respond to political queries. Even well after the election, TechCrunch found that the chatbot wouldn’t consistently answer even simple questions related to politics, like “Who is the current President?”

Some tech execs, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have added fuel to conservative accusations of Silicon Valley censorship by claiming the Biden administration pressured social media companies to suppress certain content like COVID-19 misinformation.