Nvidia backed one in every eleven $100M startup rounds last year
Nvidia was in 1 in 11 startup rounds over $100M last year
Nvidia and its venture arm NVentures appeared in 79 of the 903 startup rounds of $100M or more announced between October 2025 and September 2026 — more than any venture firm, edging out Sequoia's 75 and Andreessen Horowitz's 73. Nvidia alone joined 65, beating Lightspeed, General Catalyst and Accel. Corporate investors appeared in 38% of these rounds, up from 35% a year earlier.
A list of the most active investors in large rounds that leaves out corporates misses one of the top three.
- pavlov
Evidence that large VC rounds are getting very concentrated on AI (specifically the kind where you need to buy lots of NVIDIA gear).
Is this leaving good companies unfunded because they're not sufficiently "AI"?
- aurareturn
Before anyone screams "circular financing", it really isn't.
It's almost certainly about making sure that these startups use Nvidia stack.
- ghostfoxgod
Hey all, I run a funding-data API and I pulled every venture round of $100M or more from Oct 2025 to Sep 2026 that named its investors, we have 903 in total for this group.
And we found that Nvidia (or its venture arm) was in 79 of them. Sequoia was in 75 and a16z in 73. Nvidia on its own beat Lightspeed, General Catalyst and Accel.
Two other things that kinda surprised me was that counting rounds and counting dollars give different leaders.
So the average round Fidelity joined was $7.7B, against $3.5B for Sequoia and 38% of these rounds had a corporate investor, up from 35% the year before.
The obvious question is how much of this is Nvidia funding demand for its own chips. I'd like to hear from people who've been on either side of one of these rounds.
- rwmj
For what was until a few days ago the largest public company in the US, that doesn't sound unusual?
- glimshe
Looks like Jensen Huang has been making the rounds...