Nvidia, a leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) semiconductor company, is significantly expanding its role in the global venture capital market by increasing investments in startups, particularly in AI sector.
Nvidia has become a big player in the venture market, significantly increasing the number of investments it made in startups last year.
Some analysts say that Nvidia’s investments are more valuable as a kind of “guarantee check” than the amount of money itself.
For instance, when ‘SoundHound AI’, an AI voice recognition company, announced in February that it had received investment from Nvidia, its stock price skyrocketed by 67% in a single day.
‘Twelve Labs’, a South Korean startup that specializes in developing Multimodal AI capable of understanding videos as humans do, received investment from Nvidia in Oct. 2023.
This marked the first time Nvidia invested in a Korean startup. Unlike other major AI models such as OpenAI’s GPT and Meta’s Llama, which focus on text and images, Twelve Labs specializes in video and has been recognized for its potential.
Aiden Lee, also known by his Korean name Lee Seung-joon, the CTO of Twelve Labs, is scheduled to participate as a panelist on visual data processing at Nvidia’s developer conference ‘GTC 2024′ in San Jose, USA, on Mar. 18.
According to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), financial information firm Dealogic reported that Nvidia invested in approximately 30 startups last year, which is more than three times the number in 2022.
As of January, Nvidia’s investment value in other companies exceeded $1.5 billion, which is nearly five times the amount in January of the previous year ($299 million).
The WSJ mentioned that Nvidia’s venture investments are leading rapidly changing technology trends, establishing itself as one of the most popular venture investors in the industry.
Nvidia is expanding its ecosystem by actively investing in various fields that can be benefited from AI.
In July 2023, the company invested $50 million in ‘Recursion Pharmaceuticals’, a biotech company that uses AI in the drug development process.
Other companies using Nvidia’s infrastructure, such as Moon Surgical and ‘CoreWeave’, have also received significant investments from Nvidia. ‘Moon Surgical’ is a French surgical robot company, while CoreWeave operates data centers composed of Nvidia’s AI semiconductors.
