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NVentures, Nvidia's corporate venture arm, has teamed up with prominent climate investor Capricorn to lead a $99 million Series C for a startup developing laser-based manufacturing technology intended to decarbonize the industrial sector. Seurat Technologies raised the round at a post-money valuation of around $342 million, according to PitchBook data.
The investment in Seurat is the latest in a string of startup bets by Nvidia. Emboldened by the explosion of interest in chips for AI technology and riding high on recent blockbuster earnings, the semiconductor giant has been on the hunt for venture deals, especially in verticals with potential future applications for the semiconductor industry.
Since January, Nvidia and affiliate investors have participated in 33 VC deals funding startups spanning robotics, machine learning, SaaS and cloud computing, according to PitchBook data.
The chipmaker's flurry of activity stands in contrast to a wider pullback from venture by nontraditional investors: The portion of VC deals with corporate venture capital participation dipped to an eight-year low in Q3 2023, at just 24.1% of all deals, according to the Q3 2023 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor.
Founded in 2015, Seurat uses its specialized 3D-printing laser technology to bypass the heavy emissions and cost involved in bulk-production of metal parts.
Seurat was originally spun out of a US Department of Energy-sponsored federal laboratory to develop technology to build a nuclear fusion plant, but it's since broadened to developing any next-generation manufacturing parts and machinery. The company says it can produce metal parts 10 times faster than existing technology.
But 3D printing demands immense data processing computational power—even exabytes for a single simple printing operation—because every facet of the final product needs to be described digitally.
That's where Nvidia comes in, as a leading supplier of data processing units. "There's an incredible opportunity for Nvidia to help us enable those next-gen data pipelines and capabilities to process data very very quickly," said James DeMuth, co-founder and CEO of Seurat.
In addition, 3D metal printing has been floated as a potential long-term alternative to traditional semiconductor production. 3D printing of semiconductor chips is still a while off, given their incredible complexity, but as the world struggles to create enough GPUs at pace to power the AI boom, Nvidia and others are motivated to accelerate that development.
With existing chip processing technology, even a very minor design change involves a lead time of several weeks: Next-gen 3D-printing technology aims to eliminate that delay, thereby relieving pressure on the supply chain.
In early October, NVentures co-led a $32 million round for Machina Labs, which combines machine learning and robotics to manufacture metal products. The two rounds are early indications of how Nvidia is using its venture investments to support and build relationships with founders with the potential to revolutionize how the industry builds semiconductors in the decades to come.
"I can't talk about anything yet, but I think there's a lot of opportunities for next-level capabilities because of the similarities leveraging machine learning," DeMuth said, referring to the AI-powered breakthrough that Nvidia made in computation chip design earlier this year.
A trio of corporate investors from the industry participated in the latest round: Honda Innovations, Porsche Automobil Holding and General Motors Ventures.
Nvidia has also been playing in the investor big leagues of large language models, including participating in Cohere's $270 million Series C in June.
Featured image by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
This article originally appeared on PitchBook News