Jensen Huang Exit Rattles AI Startup Funding
Original: Jensen Huang’s departure blasts big hole in AI startup funding, VCs and founders say
Why This Matters
Nvidia was the de facto backstop for capital-intensive AI infrastructure startups globally.
Jensen Huang's resignation from Nvidia after 33 years has alarmed AI investors and founders, who say the chip giant's $10B+ annual startup investments may shrink under interim CEO Colette Kress, threatening neoclouds, inference providers, and open-weight model startups.
Jensen Huang's departure from Nvidia has sent shockwaves through the AI startup world. Over the past several years, Nvidia invested in 105 funding rounds in 2026 alone, often as the largest check-writer, per PitchBook. Many of those calls came directly from Huang himself, according to Umesh Padval of Seligman Ventures, who has known Huang since the $7 billion Mellanox acquisition in 2020.
Nvidia's portfolio spans the AI stack: it backed CoreWeave while still private, participated in Crusoe's $1.4B Series E, wrote an $800M check into Reflection AI's $2B Series B, and acquired Hugging Face this year for $13 billion (expected to close in 2027). It also holds stakes in Mistral AI, Lambda, and Black Forest Labs.
Interim CEO Colette Kress is expected to pare back that dealmaking. "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."
The impact could reach beyond the U.S. "Jensen believed in open source and frankly speaking, Europe," said Dawn Capital's Shamillah Bankiya. "A cease of that support would be a massive funding gap that no one can fill." Founders like Zain Javaid of Ghost credit Huang personally with enabling an ecosystem to form around expensive infrastructure plays that otherwise wouldn't attract capital.