Jensen Huang’s resignation as CEO has cast immediate doubt over Nvidia’s pipeline of AI startup funding, after PitchBook data shows Nvidia participated in 105 startup investment rounds this year before Huang resigned. Venture capitalists and founders say the stream of checks many deals counted on is now uncertain under interim CEO Colette Kress.
Nvidia’s investment footprint and at-risk deals
Colette Kress inherits an investment book that, in the last twelve months, included an $800 million check into Reflection AI’s $2 billion Series B ‘before the open source startup began to earn meaningful revenue,’ and an agreed $13 billion acquisition of Hugging Face expected to close in 2027. Startups that had anticipated Nvidia participation are now reassessing valuations and financing plans.
Reports also highlight unusually large infrastructure commitments: companies with Nvidia backing reportedly secured $100 million to $500 million in GPUs at $1 billion-plus valuations. Crusoe’s $1.4 billion Series E is cited as a recent example; CoreWeave, Mistral AI, Lambda and Black Forest Labs are among those named as having received Nvidia support.
Nvidia leadership change prompts fears of smaller checks
Founders and investors quoted in the reporting expect more selective investments under Kress, and therefore smaller checks and lower valuations for AI-native companies that had priced Nvidia into their cap tables. ‘Nvidia is carrying almost every AI-native startup from application to neocloud,’ Shamillah Bankiya of Dawn Capital told the outlet.
One unnamed investor offered a blunt assessment of the new regime: ‘She’s much more conservative. I don’t think she’s going to commit the same amount of money to keep the early-stage ecosystem going.’ The piece also warned: ‘If your cap table or GPU allocation priced in Nvidia participation, re-underwrite this week; a single quarter of Kress-era restraint resets AI-infrastructure valuations across the stack.’
Founders and VCs now face the immediate task of re-evaluating runs of funding and GPU allocations that had assumed continued Nvidia participation; the scale and timing of any change in investment posture under the interim CEO remain central concerns for the affected startups.
