Venture investors and founders told TechCrunch that Jensen Huang's departure as Nvidia CEO could leave AI startups with far less capital for now. Nvidia participated in 105 funding rounds this year, often as the largest investor, according to PitchBook, and has put tens of billions of dollars into startups annually, TechCrunch reported. Umesh Padval, managing partner at Seligman Ventures, said most significant investment decisions came from Huang himself.
TechCrunch reported that interim CEO Colette Kress is expected to institute changes, especially to investments tied to the data center build-out. "She's much more conservative," one unnamed investor said. Nvidia's biggest bets backed neoclouds, inference providers and open-weight models, including CoreWeave, Crusoe, Mistral AI, Lambda and Black Forest Labs, and it agreed to buy Hugging Face this year for $13 billion, a deal expected to close in 2027.
Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner at Battery Ventures, expects big tech rivals to compete for Nvidia's role, but doubts companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and AMD will put hundreds of millions into pre-revenue infrastructure startups. Investors told TechCrunch Nvidia is expected to back fewer new companies and write smaller checks into its portfolio, contributing to lower valuations. Dawn Capital's Shamilla Bankiya said an end to that support in Europe would leave a gap no one can fill.
