Huang Exit Puts Nvidia's AI Startup Funding Pipeline in Doubt

Nvidia participated in 105 startup investment rounds this year alone before Jensen Huang resigned as CEO, according to PitchBook data cited by TechCrunch, and the VCs and founders quoted in the piece say the pipeline that depended on those checks is now in doubt. Interim CEO Colette Kress, the longtime CFO, 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,' plus an agreed $13 billion acquisition of Hugging Face expected to close in 2027.

'Nvidia is carrying almost every AI-native startup from application to neocloud,' Shamillah Bankiya of Dawn Capital told the outlet.

One unnamed investor's read on the new regime was blunter: '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 checks have been unusually large for infrastructure plays. TechCrunch reports that startups with Nvidia backing raised $100 million to $500 million in GPUs at $1 billion-plus valuations, with Crusoe's $1.4 billion Series E cited as a recent example. CoreWeave, Mistral AI, Lambda, and Black Forest Labs sit in the same backed-by-Nvidia bucket.

Context on Kress is accumulating fast. This is the latest in a run of stories we've tracked about her management posture, alongside reporting that Huang called her 'a deer in the headlights' at an August chip-backstop meeting. Founders in the piece expect smaller checks, more selective new investments, and lower valuations for AI-native companies that had priced Nvidia participation into their cap tables.