Nvidia wrote 105 startup checks this year. Jensen Huang's exit puts that number in question.

One number explains why venture capitalists started making calls within hours of Jensen Huang’s resignation last Thursday: 105. That’s how many funding rounds Nvidia has joined this year alone, according to PitchBook data cited by TechCrunch, often as the largest check at the table. Huang ran that checkbook personally, by multiple investors’ accounts, and he doesn’t work at Nvidia anymore.

“It’s like a bomb went off,” one neocloud founder told TechCrunch’s Marina Temkin and Dominic-Madori Davis when he heard the news. Our post from the day Huang resigned covered the boardroom story: the affairs, the spy assessment, the 13% stock drop. This is the follow-up nobody wanted to need. It’s about where the money goes now.

Why Nvidia’s money mattered more than its chips

Most readers know Nvidia as the company that sells the GPUs. Fewer know it also bankrolled the customers buying them. Nvidia backed CoreWeave while it was still private. It put money into two of Crusoe’s funding rounds, including a $1.4 billion Series E. It agreed to buy Hugging Face this year for $13 billion, a deal expected to close in 2027. It holds stakes in Mistral AI, Lambda and Black Forest Labs. Last year it wrote an $800 million check into Reflection AI’s $2 billion Series B, before that open-source startup had meaningful revenue, according to the Wall Street Journal as cited by TechCrunch.

Maria Davidson, founder of Relational Capital, put the stakes plainly: “If that direction changes, it’ll be a big blow to so many young companies.” Dawn Capital’s Shamilla Bankiya went further, telling TechCrunch that “Nvidia is carrying almost every AI-native startup from application to neocloud.”

The decisions ran through one person

Umesh Padval, managing partner at Seligman Ventures, has known Huang since serving on the board of Mellanox, the networking chipmaker Nvidia bought for roughly $7 billion in 2020. His account to TechCrunch matches what other investors describe: most of the significant calls to invest in a startup came from Huang himself, not a committee.

That’s the part that makes a CEO transition different from a normal one. A sales organization survives a leadership change. A dealmaking habit built around one founder’s judgment and one founder’s phone calls doesn’t automatically transfer to whoever has the title next.

Colette Kress, Nvidia’s CFO since 2013, is that person for now. The board named her interim CEO the same day Huang resigned, and Harvey Jones, the former Synopsys chief executive, became the company’s first-ever board chair. Nvidia’s own release says the board has “full confidence in Colette and the leadership team” and expects “operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption.” It says nothing about the venture checkbook specifically.

Investors aren’t waiting to find out. “She’s much more conservative,” one investor told TechCrunch. “I don’t think she’s going to commit the same amount of money to keep the early-stage ecosystem going.” TechCrunch’s sourcing on that line is a single anonymous investor, which is worth flagging: it’s a prediction about Kress’s habits, not a policy she’s announced.

What a slower Nvidia would mean

Nvidia’s biggest bets went toward neoclouds, inference providers and open-weight model labs, the kind of companies that need enormous, expensive compute before they can show much revenue. Zain Javid, co-founder of the hardware company Ghost, told TechCrunch that “Jensen’s initiatives are a big reason an ecosystem has emerged despite that.”

My read: the risk here isn’t that Nvidia stops selling chips to startups, it’s that it stops being the investor of last resort that made those chip sales financeable in the first place. A startup burning cash on GPUs can usually find a bank loan or a bigger round if a backer with Nvidia’s balance sheet is already in the cap table. Pull that backer’s willingness to write checks, and some of those same companies have to raise harder rounds, at worse terms, for the same compute bill. That’s a financing problem before it’s a technology problem, and it shows up first in valuations and down rounds, not in benchmark scores.

There’s also a reasonable case nobody’s saying as loudly: a more conservative Nvidia might be healthy. My read is that a chip supplier financing the demand for its own chips is a circular arrangement, whatever the motive behind it, and if Kress tightens the spigot, some of the weakest, most dependent startups get exposed faster than they would have under Huang. That’s a worse outcome for those specific founders and a less distorted market for everyone else.

What’s missing from TechCrunch’s reporting, and from Nvidia’s own statement, is any number for how much of that $105-billion-plus pace is contractually committed versus discretionary. Nvidia reports third-quarter results on November 17, five days into Kress’s tenure. That call, not this week’s VC quotes, is the first place to look for an actual answer.

A note on sources: I read the TechCrunch article in full and Nvidia’s CEO transition release in full. The Mellanox acquisition price and the Hugging Face deal value are as reported by TechCrunch; I haven’t independently verified either figure against a primary filing.

Sources

1. Jensen Huang’s departure blasts big hole in AI startup funding, VCs and founders say - TechCrunch
2. NVIDIA Announces CEO Transition - Nvidia Newsroom
3. Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia’s CEO - AI Scoop News