Nvidia Joined 8.7% of $100M Startup Rounds in One Count and 7.0% in Another

Datahyena counted Nvidia or its venture arm NVentures in 79 of 903 venture rounds of $100 million or more, which is 8.7 percent of the rounds that named at least one investor. Dealroom, counting a different window, put the same investor in 53 of 762 such rounds, or 7.0 percent. Neither figure is wrong, and neither can be set against the other without a correction.

Datahyena published its count on Nov. 5 as Research No. 03, written by Akash Rajpurohit and headlined "A chipmaker was in one of every eleven $100M rounds". Dealroom's version is an Investors chart dated Sept. 8, with analysis by Boris Bavinck. Both are counts of rounds joined, not dollars invested, so a $30 billion cheque and a $100 million one each score one.

What Datahyena counted, and what it left out

The window runs from Oct. 1, 2025 to Sept. 30, 2026. Datahyena found 949 venture equity rounds of $100 million or more, of which 903 named at least one investor, and every ratio in the report uses the 903. Debt, grants, IPOs and raises by listed companies are excluded. An investor counts once per round whether it led or joined, and only investors named in round coverage are counted, so the figures can undercount.

Its ranking lists Nvidia without NVentures. On that basis Nvidia alone was in 65 rounds, third behind Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz. Adding NVentures lifts the figure to 79, which would put it ahead of Sequoia's 75, though the report's own table ranks Nvidia without NVentures.

Investor	Rounds joined, Oct. 2025 to Sept. 2026
Sequoia	75
Andreessen Horowitz	73
Nvidia (NVentures excluded)	65
Lightspeed	64
General Catalyst	60
Coatue	42

The report also found that 38 percent of rounds had at least one corporate investor, up from 35 percent a year earlier. Behind Nvidia's 65, the next corporates were Salesforce at 32, GV at 29, IQT at 20 and Goldman Sachs at 19. The year-earlier comparison uses shares, not counts, because Datahyena says coverage for that year is thinner.

What Dealroom counted instead

Dealroom's window is January to August 2026, and its denominator is all 762 venture rounds of $100 million or more that it recorded. It includes NVentures. Nvidia was in 53, Andreessen Horowitz in 44, Sequoia in 42 and Lightspeed in 38. Without NVentures, Dealroom puts Nvidia at 39 rounds, which it says still ranks third.

1. Nvidia (with NVentures)53 rounds
2. Andreessen Horowitz44 rounds
3. Sequoia42 rounds
4. Lightspeed38 rounds

Source: Dealroom, Investors chart dated Sept. 8, 2026, includes NVentures

Dealroom's method, as printed on the chart: it records which investors took part in each round and the round's total size, and it does not apportion that total among them. That makes its count a measure of presence, not of capital, which is the same thing Datahyena measures.

The year-on-year figure is the sharper one. In January to August 2025 Dealroom had Nvidia in 22 such rounds, against 28 for Andreessen Horowitz and 25 for Sequoia. Nvidia's count rose by 31 rounds, or about 2.4 times, while the two funds ahead of it then rose by 16 and 17. Dealroom's chart also says Nvidia was in one round of this size in 2021. Dealroom writes that a founder raising $100 million or more in 2026 "was more likely to have NVIDIA in the round than Sequoia".

Why the two ratios do not line up

Two differences account for the gap between 8.7 and 7.0 percent that can be checked against the published figures. Dealroom's eight months sit inside Datahyena's twelve, so the two see different rounds. And Datahyena drops 46 rounds with no named investor from its denominator, which raises every share, while Dealroom keeps all 762. Strip out NVentures and the pattern repeats: 65 of 903 is 7.2 percent in Datahyena's data, and 39 of 762 is 5.1 percent in Dealroom's.

Treat the rank, not the share, as the stable finding. Nvidia without NVentures is third in both datasets, and with NVentures it leads Sequoia in both, so the ordering holds even though the ratio moves by 1.7 percentage points. The headline ratio is what will travel, and it is the least portable number in either report.

What the counts do not say

Neither dataset gives the size of Nvidia's cheque, and the amounts matter more than the count. Dealroom says it does not split a round's total among its investors, and where Nvidia has disclosed its own cheque it uses that. Its example is the $30 billion Nvidia says it put into OpenAI's $122 billion round, a figure only Nvidia's disclosure supplies. Datahyena's average-round figures show the same distortion from the other side: rounds Fidelity joined averaged $7.7 billion, against $3.5 billion for rounds Sequoia joined.

A count of rounds also says nothing about terms. Harbinger's $240 million Series D came with no valuation, and Zipline's $21.5 billion valuation rests on a site count with no start date. A tally cannot say whether a strategic investor paid the same price per share as the funds beside it.

Datahyena's own advice is to "track the strategics with the funds". Both windows close before the calendar year does, so the full-year 2026 count, available after Dec. 31, is the first that could be compared on equal terms.