2-person team has invested in 20 unicorns, deconstructing NVIDIA's "three-track" investment blueprint

Original Author: Ada, TechFlow

Recently, NVentures, the venture capital arm of NVIDIA, invested in a French quantum computing company, Alice & Bob, focusing on fault-tolerant quantum computing.

It is a common misconception to attribute all of NVIDIA's external investments to NVentures. In fact, this VC division, founded in 2021, manages a total of 30 investments per year, whose combined scale is far smaller than a single move by the Corporate Development team. For example, a single equity investment by the latter in Synopsys at the end of 2025 was worth $2 billion, several times the total amount invested by NVentures over the past three years.

To understand how NVIDIA uses capital to weave its AI ecosystem, one must start with its "three-track architecture" of investment. The Corporate Development team handles strategic large-scale investments and acquisitions ranging from billions to hundreds of billions of dollars. NVentures handles early-stage, broad, financial investments. NVIDIA Inception is a startup accelerator that provides resources without direct capital investment. Together, they form the largest and fastest capital deployment machine in Silicon Valley history, which also makes them a prime target for "circular financing" allegations from short sellers.

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

Despite operating under the NVIDIA brand, NVentures is surprisingly small internally. According to data from private market data provider Tracxn, as of May 2026, the entire team consists of just 2 people. They have invested in 79 companies cumulatively, which have produced 20 unicorns, including AI video generation platform Synthesia, clinical AI company Abridge, and quantum computing company PsiQuantum. In the past 12 months, the team completed 43 new investments, with 20 made in the first 5 months of 2026, indicating a clear acceleration in pace.

NVentures is led by Mohamed "Sid" Siddeek, Vice President of NVIDIA and Head of NVentures. Siddeek's resume itself reflects NVIDIA's positioning for this division. He worked at Morgan Stanley in the late 1990s, accompanying Jensen Huang during NVIDIA's IPO roadshow. He then spent nearly 10 years as Head of TMT and Telecom Investments at Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, followed by a role at SoftBank Vision Fund overseeing enterprise software and healthcare investments. In 2021, he returned to NVIDIA to establish NVentures.

Siddeek described the investment scope: "The real filter is only two layers. The first is anything NVIDIA can touch. The second is which sectors are investable." In an interview with Global Corporate Venturing, he revealed that this means horizontal coverage of healthcare, manufacturing, robotics, autonomous driving, quantum, and virtually all industries that AI can transform, with verticals ranging from underlying tools to application layers all within NVentures' investment scope.

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

NVIDIA's external investment system is composed of 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 investments, joint ventures, and acquisitions. The scale of investments on this track is entirely different from NVentures. Representative moves from the second half of 2025 to the first half of 2026 include leading a $30 billion investment in OpenAI in February 2026 (as part of an approximately $110 billion funding round) with a pledge of up to $100 billion in future investment; a $10 billion commitment to Anthropic in November 2025; a $2 billion injection into Synopsys at the end of 2025; an additional $2 billion investment and a $6.3 billion cloud capacity procurement agreement with CoreWeave in early 2026; a $2 billion investment in Nebius in March 2026; and equity commitments of up to $2 billion to xAI.

According to CNBC, in just the first 4 months of 2026, the Corporate Development team led over $40 billion in AI equity investments. NVIDIA invested a total of $17.5 billion in private companies and infrastructure funds in fiscal year 2025.

The second track is NVentures, led by Sid Siddeek, positioned as a traditional VC seeking financial returns. Individual investment sizes range from millions to tens of millions of dollars, primarily targeting Seed to Series B stages. Siddeek explicitly told Global Venturing that NVentures "primarily focuses on early-stage investments, while the Corporate Development team handles larger, more directly strategic investments." In terms of behavior, NVentures mainly acts as a co-investor, leading in only about one-eighth of its investments, often participating in rounds led by top-tier VCs like Accel, a16z, and Sequoia with NVIDIA's endorsement.

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, marketing, and VC matchmaking channels. The "VC Alliance" launched by NVIDIA in 2025, partnering with Accel, Elaia, Partech, Sofinnova, and others to distribute NVIDIA DGX Cloud Lepton computing credits to their portfolio companies, is an extension of Inception in Europe.

A clear "funnel" relationship exists among the three. Inception discovers early-stage projects and introduces them to NVIDIA's ecosystem. Those with investment potential enter NVentures' purview, potentially 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 key customer, crucial supplier, or potential acquisition target), it is "upgraded" to the Corporate Development team, entering cooperation frameworks worth billions or even hundreds of billions of dollars.

Recent NVentures Moves: Quantum, Inference Routing, AI Security

In May 2026, NVentures' activity was considerable. Within the last month alone, four deals have been 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 technology 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 and Snowflake. OpenRouter provides developers 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 and AMD. 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 clearly tilted towards three directions: Quantum computing (Alice & Bob, Quantinuum, PsiQuantum), AI biopharmaceuticals (Relation Therapeutics, Genesis Therapeutics), and AI Agents & Inference layers (OpenRouter, Tensormesh, etc.). This aligns with Siddeek's statement of "any field NVIDIA can touch" and corresponds precisely to areas where NVIDIA is investing in next-generation software stacks like CUDA-Q, CUDA-X, and Triton.

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

Panorama of the Three-Tier Linked Investment Portfolio

If you map the portfolios of all three investment tiers onto one map, NVIDIA's "capital radiation" into the AI ecosystem can be summarized into five main quadrants.

Foundation Model Layer includes OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, Cohere, Thinking Machines Lab, Reflection AI, Black Forest Labs. This layer is primarily funded by the Corporate Development team, with NVentures co-investing smaller shares.

Cloud & Infrastructure includes CoreWeave, Nebius, Lambda, Crusoe, Nscale, Firmus Technologies. This layer is also dominated by the Corporate Development team, with individual investments easily reaching tens of billions of dollars, accompanied by long-term computing capacity procurement contracts.

Applications & Developer Tools includes Cursor, Perplexity, Synthesia, Runway, Lovable, Together AI, Weka. NVentures has a higher participation rate in this layer, with relatively smaller investment amounts.

Robotics & Autonomous Driving includes Figure AI (latest valuation $39 billion), Wayve (valuation $8.6 billion). The Corporate Development team and NVentures make joint investments here.

Quantum Computing & Biopharmaceuticals includes PsiQuantum, Quantinuum, Alice & Bob, Relation Therapeutics. This quadrant is primarily composed of early-stage investments led by NVentures, serving as NVIDIA's hedging layout against "post-GPU era" computing paradigms.

According to statistics from venture capital research firm F4 Fund, from 2025 to early 2026, in investment rounds involving NVIDIA (Corporate Development + NVentures), at least 10 companies crossed the $1 billion valuation mark, 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 map is drawing 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 against 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 then-current stock price, and 50,000 put option contracts on Palantir (each contract representing 100 shares), costing a premium of approximately $9.2 million. Burry posted on his X account "Cassandra Unchained" a picture from "The Big Short" with the caption "Sometimes, we can see a bubble," and subsequently reposted a Bloomberg chart about NVIDIA's circular financing, directly targeting NVIDIA's capital deployment model.

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

Similar suspicions are mounting at the institutional level. In March 2026, EU competition regulators explicitly included the "circular spending risk" within NVIDIA's investment system in their review scope. Seaport Research estimates that for every $1 of equity invested by NVIDIA, it generates approximately $3.5 in downstream chip procurement revenue. A Bloomberg special report in March 2026 on "AI Circular Trading" mapped the capital flows between NVIDIA, CoreWeave, OpenAI, Oracle, and Anthropic into a dense network diagram. NVIDIA holds about 7% equity in CoreWeave; CoreWeave uses NVIDIA GPUs as collateral for financing, using the cash to buy more GPUs from NVIDIA; NVIDIA then signs a $6.3 billion cloud capacity procurement agreement, committing to absorb CoreWeave's excess capacity through 2032. NVIDIA pledges up to $100 billion investment to OpenAI; OpenAI commits to purchasing NVIDIA hardware and building a $300 billion data center through Oracle; Oracle then buys GPUs from NVIDIA. NVIDIA invests $10 billion in Anthropic; Anthropic commits to deploying Claude on Microsoft Azure; Azure then procures NVIDIA Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.

Counterarguments from supporters also exist. Asset management firm Janus Henderson characterizes this model as a "virtuous cycle," arguing that in an era of extreme computing scarcity, binding supply and demand through "equity plus long-term procurement contracts" is a reasonable 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, which in turn acts as a constraint against the impulse to push hardware aggressively in the short term.

NVentures' position is quite nuanced in this controversy. Its investment style – early-stage, small-ticket, primarily co-investing, industry-diversified – forms a stark contrast with the Corporate Development team's "circular transaction" model. Companies like Alice & Bob, Tensormesh, and OpenRouter, which NVentures invests in, are not large enough to constitute the "both NVIDIA customer and NVIDIA investment target" circularity. Their investment behavior is closer to traditional CVC's financial investment logic. However, from the perspective of NVIDIA's overall investment system, whether NVentures acts to some extent as a "VC compliance facade" for public disclosure, making it easier for the outside world to perceive NVIDIA's investment activities as normal VC behavior rather than systematic vendor financing, is an implicit but unarticulated question underlying Burry's and EU regulators' concerns.

NVIDIA's consistent official stance is that all investments are made based on independent business judgment and are not tied to hardware sales. However, market observers are increasingly citing a sentiment: in an era of computing scarcity, whether to believe that "the entanglement of equity and procurement contracts is a coincidence" is fundamentally a matter of trust.