Nvidia Has Backed 121 Startups in 2026, and Investors Expect Its Interim CEO to Write Smaller Checks

Nvidia and its venture arm NVentures have joined 121 startup funding rounds so far in 2026, up from 91 in 2025 and 54 in 2024, according to Crunchbase News, published November 13. That is the most of any corporate investor in 2026, and the count was compiled in the week Jensen Huang left the chief executive's job.

TechCrunch reports that Colette Kress, the chief financial officer, is interim CEO and is expected to change how Nvidia invests. If she does, the startups most exposed are the ones whose last round leaned on Nvidia's name.

Two counts, two methods

Crunchbase's figure of more than 120 deals, 121 by its later count, includes NVentures. TechCrunch, citing PitchBook, puts Nvidia in 105 rounds in 2026. The 16-deal gap is unexplained in either piece, and the likeliest cause is what each database counts as a round, which neither says.

Crunchbase adds that Nvidia or NVentures was lead or co-lead in about one 2026 deal in five, roughly 24 of the 121 by The Terminal's arithmetic.

1. 202454 deals
2. 202591 deals
3. 2026121 deals

Source: Crunchbase News, November 13, 2026 (2026 figure is year to date)

What the checks looked like

The rounds Nvidia joins are large, though the figures below are whole-round sizes, not Nvidia's share. The list also names Bedrock Robotics ($600 million Series C in October, after a $270 million Series B in February) and Aidoc ($150 million Series E in April), which are nearer the size where one investor's signal matters most.

Company	Round	Whole round	Month
OpenAI	Series G	$122 billion	March
Anthropic	Series G	$30 billion	February
Crusoe	Series F	$3.9 billion	September
Mistral AI	Series D	about $3.5 billion	September
Skild AI	Series C	$1.4 billion	January
Waabi	Series C	$750 million	January

TechCrunch gives the smaller-company pattern. Under Huang, it reports, infrastructure firms that needed $100 million to $500 million of GPUs often raised about half of it from Nvidia, at valuations of $1 billion or more. It also lists an $800 million cheque into Reflection AI's $2 billion Series B in 2025, and a $13 billion agreement to buy Hugging Face that TechCrunch says is expected to close in 2027. The Terminal has not confirmed the Hugging Face figure against a second source.

What investors told TechCrunch

Umesh Padval, managing partner at Seligman Ventures, told TechCrunch: "When Nvidia was on the cap table, everyone felt safe." Maria Davidson, founder of Relational Capital, said: "If that direction changes, it'll be a big blow to so many young companies." Shamilla Bankiya of Dawn Capital said: "Nvidia is carrying almost every AI-native startup from application to neocloud."

The expected change is specific: more selective new investments and smaller cheques to existing portfolio companies, which could lower the valuations those companies raise at. Nvidia itself has not described any change in a source The Terminal fetched.

The counter-case

Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at Battery Ventures, expects big technology rivals to compete for Nvidia's role, TechCrunch reports, but doubts they will put hundreds of millions into pre-revenue infrastructure companies. Some investors hope Google, Amazon, Microsoft or AMD will step in.

There is also a reason to read the story with restraint. Kress has been interim CEO for days, and a list of expected changes from venture investors is a forecast about someone else's budget. TechCrunch also quotes Amulya Vishwanath, a former Nvidia employee who now runs her own venture fund, saying "founders and leaders must be held accountable". That is a comment about Huang's exit and says nothing about future cheque sizes. Two other stories on the site touch the same sector: Nscale weighing a delay to its $3.5 billion IPO, and the Fractile Series C, a chip startup raise structured across three share classes. Neither report ties those companies to Nvidia's investing, so they are context, not evidence.

Why the gap matters for a seed-stage founder

Padval's remark about feeling safe points at a signal as much as a cheque, and TechCrunch's reporting suggests the signal is what investors fear losing: Zain Javid, co-founder of hardware company Ghost, told the outlet that "Jensen's initiatives are a big reason an ecosystem has emerged despite that."

The counting problem matters for the same reason. If Nvidia joined 105 rounds, one in five leads would be about 21, and if it joined 121, about 24. In both cases the large majority of its deals were follow-ons or minority participations, which is the kind that a more conservative investment committee trims first.

What would settle it

Nvidia reports earnings on November 17, per Crunchbase, with its valuation still close to $4 trillion even after the week's share-price fall. The number to watch afterwards is the deal count itself: if 2026 finishes near 121 and the fourth-quarter pace holds, the expectation of retrenchment was early. If new Nvidia-backed rounds slow through December, the venture capitalists quoted above will have been right.