2 Team Members, 20 Unicorns: Deconstructing NVIDIA's "Three-Track Architecture" Investment Blueprint

Original Author: Ada, TechFlow

Recently, NVIDIA's venture capital arm, NVentures, made a new investment in a French quantum computing company called Alice & Bob, focusing on fault-tolerant quantum computing.

It is a common misconception to attribute all of NVIDIA's external investments to NVentures. In reality, this venture capital division, established in 2021, manages a portfolio where the total volume of its 30 annual investments combined is far smaller than a single move by the Corporate Development team. The latter's equity investment of $2 billion in Synopsys at the end of 2025 alone is several times the cumulative investment amount of NVentures over the past three years.

To understand how NVIDIA uses capital to weave its AI ecosystem, one must start with the "three-track structure" of its investment system. The Corporate Development team handles strategic large-scale investments and acquisitions worth billions to hundreds of billions of dollars. NVentures is responsible for early-stage, broad-based financial investments. NVIDIA Inception is a startup accelerator, contributing resources and connections rather than direct capital. Working together, they form one of the largest and fastest capital deployment machines in Silicon Valley history, also becoming the core target of "circular financing" allegations from short sellers.

The True Face of NVentures: 2-Person Team, 79 Companies, 20 Unicorns

Despite bearing the NVIDIA brand, NVentures is surprisingly small internally. According to private data firm Tracxn, as of May 2026, the entire team consists of just 2 people, having invested in 79 companies cumulatively and nurturing 20 unicorns. These include the AI video generation platform Synthesia, clinical AI company Abridge, and quantum computing company PsiQuantum. Over the past 12 months, the team completed 43 new investments, with 20 transactions in the first 5 months of 2026 alone, marking a clear acceleration in pace.

Leading NVentures is Mohamed "Sid" Siddeek, Vice President and Head of NVentures. Siddeek's resume itself reflects NVIDIA's positioning for this division. In the late 1990s, he worked at Morgan Stanley, accompanying Jensen Huang during NVIDIA's IPO roadshow. He later spent nearly a decade as Head of TMT & Telecom Investments at Mubadala, an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, before moving to SoftBank Vision Fund to oversee enterprise software and healthcare investments. He returned to NVIDIA in 2021 to establish NVentures.

Siddeek's own description of the investment scope is: "The real screening criteria are only two layers – first, any area NVIDIA can touch; second, which sectors are investable." In an exclusive interview with Global Corporate Venturing, he revealed this means horizontal coverage of almost all industries AI can transform, including healthcare, manufacturing, robotics, autonomous driving, and quantum, with vertical range from underlying tools to the application layer, all within NVentures' investment purview.

The Three-Track Structure: Corp Dev for Strategy, NVentures for Early Stage, Inception for Ecosystem

NVIDIA's external investment system comprises three distinct parts with clear division of labor.

The first track is the Corporate Development team, led by Vishal Bhagwati, responsible for all strategic-level large-scale investments, joint ventures, and acquisitions. The magnitude of transactions on this track is on a completely different scale from NVentures. Representative deals from the second half of 2025 to the first half of 2026 include: leading the $30 billion investment in OpenAI in February 2026 (as part of an approximately $110 billion funding round), with a commitment to potentially increase this to $100 billion in the future; a $10 billion commitment to Anthropic in November 2025; $2 billion injected into Synopsys at the end of 2025; an additional $2 billion investment in CoreWeave in early 2026, coupled with a $6.3 billion cloud capacity purchase agreement; a $2 billion investment in Nebius in March 2026; and an equity commitment of up to $2 billion in xAI.

According to CNBC, in the first 4 months of 2026 alone, the Corporate Development team led over $40 billion in AI equity investments. NVIDIA's total spending on private companies and infrastructure funds in fiscal year 2025 was $17.5 billion.

The second track is NVentures, led by Sid Siddeek, positioned as traditional venture capital pursuing financial returns. Individual deal sizes range from millions to tens of millions of dollars, primarily targeting Seed to Series B rounds. Siddeek explicitly stated to Global Venturing that NVentures "mainly focuses on early-stage investments, while the Corporate Development team handles larger, more directly strategic investments." Behaviorally, NVentures primarily follows on investments, leading only about one-eighth of its deals. It often participates in rounds led by top-tier VCs like Accel, a16z, and Sequoia, leveraging NVIDIA's backing.

The third track is NVIDIA Inception, essentially a startup accelerator program. It does not provide direct capital but offers startups NVIDIA hardware credits, technical support, go-to-market assistance, and VC networking channels. NVIDIA's upgraded "VC Alliance" launched in 2025, collaborating with institutions like Accel, Elaia, Partech, and Sofinnova, distributes NVIDIA DGX Cloud Lepton compute credits to their portfolio companies, extending Inception's reach in Europe.

A clear "funnel" relationship exists among the three. Inception discovers early-stage projects and integrates them into the NVIDIA ecosystem. Those with investment potential enter NVentures' purview, possibly receiving early-stage checks of millions to tens of millions of dollars. When a company grows to a scale capable of influencing NVIDIA's strategic layout – becoming a significant customer, key supplier, or potential acquisition target – it gets "upgraded" to the Corporate Development team, entering a cooperation framework worth billions or even hundreds of billions of dollars.

NVentures' Recent Moves: Quantum, Inference Routing, AI Security

In May 2026, NVentures showed considerable activity. In just the last month, four deals were publicly disclosed. On May 22, French quantum computing company Alice & Bob announced NVentures' participation in the extension of its €100 million Series B round. Alice & Bob's core technology is a fault-tolerant quantum computing architecture based on "cat qubits," deeply collaborating with NVIDIA's quantum-classical hybrid computing stack like CUDA-Q, cuQuantum, Dynamiqs, and NVQLink. On May 26, AI model routing platform OpenRouter completed a $113 million Series B round, with NVentures co-investing alongside Google's CapitalG, Snowflake, and others. OpenRouter provides developers with a unified interface to access APIs from dozens of different model providers globally. On May 28, AI inference infrastructure startup Tensormesh completed a $20 million Seed extension round, with NVentures co-investing alongside CoreWeave, AMD, and others. On May 6, AI cybersecurity company Xbow completed a $35 million Series C extension round, with NVentures participating.

Looking at the investment targets, NVentures has recently shown a clear tilt towards three directions: Quantum Computing (Alice & Bob, Quantinuum, PsiQuantum), AI Biopharma (Relation Therapeutics, Genesis Therapeutics), and AI Agents and Inference Layer (OpenRouter, Tensormesh, etc.). This aligns with Siddeek's description of "any area NVIDIA can touch" and corresponds precisely to the directions NVIDIA is investing in for next-generation software stacks like CUDA-Q, CUDA-X, and Triton.

Geographically, NVentures' European expansion is notably accelerating. It completed 14 European investments in 2025, double the 7 deals in 2024.

Panorama of the Three-Tiered Investment Portfolio

Placing the portfolios of the three investment tiers on the same map, NVIDIA's "capital radiation" across the AI ecosystem can be summarized into five main quadrants.

The Foundation Model layer includes OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, Cohere, Thinking Machines Lab, Reflection AI, and Black Forest Labs. This layer is primarily funded by the Corporate Development team, with NVentures participating in smaller follow-on shares.

The Cloud and Infrastructure layer includes CoreWeave, Nebius, Lambda, Crusoe, Nscale, and Firmus Technologies. This layer is also dominated by the Corporate Development team, with individual investments often amounting to billions of dollars, accompanied by long-term compute procurement contracts.

The Applications and Developer Tools layer includes Cursor, Perplexity, Synthesia, Runway, Lovable, Together AI, and Weka. NVentures has a higher involvement in this layer, with relatively smaller deal sizes.

The Robotics and Autonomous Driving layer includes Figure AI (latest valuation $39 billion) and Wayve (valuation $8.6 billion). The Corporate Development team and NVentures collaborate on these deals.

The Quantum Computing and Biopharma layer includes PsiQuantum, Quantinuum, Alice & Bob, and Relation Therapeutics. This layer primarily comprises early-stage investments led by NVentures, serving as NVIDIA's hedging layout for post-GPU era computing paradigms.

According to statistics from venture capital research firm F4 Fund, between 2025 and early 2026, in investment rounds involving NVIDIA (Corporate Development + NVentures), at least 10 companies crossed the $1 billion valuation threshold, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, Figure AI, Cursor, Perplexity, Scale AI, Wayve, and others.

Controversy: Burry's Short and the 'Circular Financing' Question

However, NVIDIA's vast external investment landscape is attracting increasing scrutiny. The most representative criticism comes from Michael Burry, the hedge fund manager famous from the movie "The Big Short."

According to Scion Asset Management's Q3 2025 13F filing, Burry established short positions in NVIDIA and Palantir before September 30, 2025. This included put options on approximately 1 million shares of NVIDIA, representing a notional exposure of about $187 million at the time, and 50,000 put option contracts on Palantir (each contract representing 100 shares), with an actual premium expenditure of about $9.2 million. Burry posted on his X account "Cassandra Unchained" an image from "The Big Short" with the caption "Sometimes, we can see a bubble," and subsequently retweeted a Bloomberg chart about NVIDIA's circular financing, directly targeting NVIDIA's capital deployment model.

Burry's specific allegations are technical. In his Substack post, he estimated that between 2026 and 2028, cloud providers including Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Meta would underestimate cumulative depreciation by approximately $176 billion by extending the accounting depreciation life of NVIDIA GPUs, thus inflating their profits over the same period. This accounting adjustment resonates with NVIDIA's equity investments in its clients: the former gives buyers higher "book profits" to absorb larger capital expenditures, while the latter directly provides buyers with funds to purchase NVIDIA hardware.

At an institutional level, similar suspicions are accumulating. In March 2026, EU competition regulators explicitly placed the "circular spending risk" within NVIDIA's investment system under review. Seaport Research estimates that for every $1 NVIDIA invests in equity, it corresponds to about $3.5 in downstream chip procurement revenue. A Bloomberg feature on "AI Circular Trades" published in March 2026 mapped the capital flows between NVIDIA, CoreWeave, OpenAI, Oracle, and Anthropic into a dense network. NVIDIA holds about 7% equity in CoreWeave, which uses NVIDIA GPUs as collateral to finance the purchase of more GPUs with cash from NVIDIA; NVIDIA then signs a $6.3 billion cloud capacity purchase agreement, committing to absorb CoreWeave's excess capacity until 2032. NVIDIA commits up to $100 billion to OpenAI, which commits to buying NVIDIA hardware and building a $300 billion data center through Oracle, which in turn buys GPUs from NVIDIA. NVIDIA invests $10 billion in Anthropic, which commits to deploying Claude on Microsoft Azure, which then purchases NVIDIA Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.

Counterarguments from supporters also exist. Asset manager Janus Henderson characterizes this model as a "virtuous cycle," arguing that in an era of extreme compute scarcity, binding supply and demand sides through "equity + long-term procurement contracts" is a sound business arrangement. Morningstar's analysis points out that NVIDIA's arrangement to "commit to buying excess capacity" from CoreWeave actually makes NVIDIA itself bear CoreWeave's inventory risk, ironically acting as a constraint on the impulse to push short-term hardware sales.

In this controversy, NVentures' position is quite nuanced. Its investment style – early-stage, small-ticket, primarily follow-on, and industry-diversified – presents a stark contrast to the "circular transaction" model of the Corporate Development team. Companies like Alice & Bob, Tensormesh, and OpenRouter, which NVentures invests in, are not large enough to constitute the "both customer and investment target" loop. Their investment behavior is closer to the financial investment logic of traditional corporate venture capital. However, from the perspective of NVIDIA's overall investment system, the unspoken but implicit question from Burry and EU regulators is whether NVentures, to some extent, acts as a "venture capital compliance cloak" in public disclosures, making it easier for outsiders to perceive NVIDIA's investment activities as normal VC behavior rather than systematic supplier financing.

NVIDIA's consistent official stance is that all investments are based on independent business judgment and are not tied to hardware sales. However, market observers increasingly cite a phrase: in an era of compute scarcity, whether one believes "the entanglement of equity and procurement contracts is a coincidence" is itself a matter of trust.