Analysis
Nvidia and its venture arm NVentures have participated in 121 startup funding rounds so far in 2026, a record for the chipmaker, Crunchbase News reported on November 13, 2026, days after co-founder Jensen Huang's sudden departure as CEO. Crunchbase counts 91 known startup financings for Nvidia the prior year, up from 54 the year before that, so the 2026 total is already more than double the count from two years ago with seven weeks of the year left.
What changed since Huang's exit
Pulse covered Huang's resignation and Colette Kress's appointment as interim CEO on November 12, and the same day Nvidia's $10 billion commitment to Anthropic's IPO placement. The new piece of information is about the investing machine Huang leaves behind. Crunchbase, citing Reuters, reports that Kress, Nvidia's CFO before she became interim CEO, had pushed back on Huang's increasingly large AI investments before the news broke. Nvidia's board has said it expects operations to continue without interruption, per Crunchbase. That statement covers the chip business; it says nothing specific about the startup portfolio.
How many startups has Nvidia invested in?
By Crunchbase's count, Nvidia is the most active corporate investor of 2026. It is listed as lead or co-lead investor in about 1 in 5 of its deals this year, which means most of the 121 are rounds where Nvidia took a participant's allocation rather than setting the price. Crunchbase also notes that the dollar figures below are whole-round totals that include other investors' money, not the size of Nvidia's own checks.
“By Crunchbase's count, Nvidia is the most active corporate investor of 2026.”
Value Add VC data
The largest 2026 rounds Nvidia or NVentures joined, per Crunchbase:
- Jan 2026, Skild AI Series C -- $1.4B round, NVentures participated (Crunchbase News)
- Jan 2026, Waabi Series C -- $750M round, NVentures participated (Crunchbase News)
- Feb 2026, Anthropic Series G -- $30B round, Nvidia participated (Crunchbase News)
- Feb 2026, Bedrock Robotics Series B -- $270M round, NVentures participated (Crunchbase News)
- Mar 2026, OpenAI Series G -- $122B round, Nvidia participated (Crunchbase News)
- Apr 2026, Aidoc Series E -- $150M round, NVentures participated (Crunchbase News)
- Sep 2026, Crusoe Series F -- $3.9B round, Nvidia participated (Crunchbase News)
- Sep 2026, Mistral AI Series D -- roughly $3.5B round, Nvidia participated (Crunchbase News)
- Oct 2026, Bedrock Robotics Series C -- $600M round, NVentures participated (Crunchbase News)
Bedrock Robotics is the one name on the list where NVentures came back for a second 2026 round, from a $270 million Series B in February to a $600 million Series C in October.
The list also runs across the whole stack: model labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral AI), compute infrastructure (Crusoe), robotics (Skild AI, Bedrock Robotics), autonomous driving (Waabi) and medical imaging (Aidoc). Nvidia was also in this week's news as a backer of Agile Robots' $500 million round at an $8.5 billion valuation, which SoftBank led.
Who could fill the gap
The question for founders is not whether Nvidia's GPUs stay in demand but whether the company keeps showing up on cap tables. In Israel, where Nvidia employs about 6,000 people after buying Mellanox for $6.9 billion in 2019, per TechCrunch, investors told TechCrunch they expect slower decisions at a less centralized Nvidia. Yanai Oron, a general partner at Vertex Ventures Israel, said slower decisions could give competitors an opening, and Adi Levanon of Selah Ventures said the challengers now have a window to prove a different approach delivers better economics.
The caveat on the record count is that it measures participation, not dollars. A 121-deal year in which Nvidia leads about one round in five is a broad, mostly follow-on footprint, and Crunchbase does not give Nvidia's own dollars in any of these rounds. A slowdown would show up first in fewer new participations, not in the existing positions, which stay on the books whoever runs the company. Whether Nvidia keeps that pace under a CEO who reportedly argued against the size of these bets, gets its first public test on Nvidia's November 17 earnings call.