With a valuation of 85.3 billion, Jensen Huang is reported to invest in another AI company.

On October 31st, according to foreign media Bloomberg citing sources familiar with the matter, Nvidia plans to invest up to $1 billion (approximately 7.1 billion yuan) in U.S. AI startup Poolside. If the deal is finalized, Poolside's valuation will soar fourfold to $12 billion (approximately 85.3 billion yuan).

The company was founded in early 2023 by Jason Warner, the former CTO of GitHub, and software entrepreneur Eiso Kant, focusing on the AI programming field. Nvidia participated in its $500 million Series B financing last October when the company's valuation was still $3 billion (approximately 21.3 billion yuan).

▲ Poolside co-founders Jason Warner (left) and Eiso Kant (right)

A source familiar with the matter revealed that Poolside is in talks to raise $2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion. Nvidia will participate in this round of financing, with an investment between $500 million and $1 billion.

According to a source, Poolside has received investment commitments of over $1 billion in the latest round of financing, including approximately $700 million from existing investors. Another source said that the asset management firm Magnetar, known for its hedge fund investments, is also in talks to participate in this round of financing, which was previously reported by The Information.

Poolside has offices in the United States and Paris. Its products focus on programming automation, but the company has more ambitious goals - to build a general-purpose artificial intelligence (AGI) with wide applications. In addition to the Series B financing mentioned above, in August 2023, Poolside also completed a $126 million seed round of financing led by French billionaire Xavier Niel and U.S. venture capital firm Felicis Ventures.

Currently, the company has only launched one product, which is a coding assistant for software engineers in government agencies and the defense sector launched in October 2024. Relevant officials said at the product launch that Poolside offers users two models, Point and Malibu. The linear attention model Point is about 10 times faster than existing comparable models. The company also proposed an innovative technology called "learning by code execution feedback (LCE)" to train the model to think like a developer and understand the complexity of software development.

Since the beginning of this year, Nvidia has increased its investment in AI startups. Previously, Zhidx reported that as of October 9th, Nvidia had participated in 50 AI-related financings this year, including well-known startups such as OpenAI, Mistral AI, and Reflection AI, exceeding the total of 48 in the whole of 2024. (From the article "Jensen Huang's 'Money-Sprinkling' Sets a Record! Nvidia's Super AI Empire Rises, but Leaves China Out")

These startups may also become important customers for Nvidia in the future. A source familiar with the matter revealed that Poolside plans to use part of the new funds to purchase Nvidia's GB300 chips.

This round of financing aligns with Poolside's infrastructure construction plan. Earlier this month, the company announced a partnership with CoreWeave to build a large data center in the United States, which is part of the "Project Horizon". The data center will be built in western Texas, with an expected installed capacity of 2 gigawatts, which is enough to meet the electricity needs of approximately 1.5 million households.

Poolside partner and CEO Eiso Kant revealed in an interview in 2024 that the close cooperation with Nvidia makes Poolside willing to accept Nvidia's investment. In its $500 million Series B financing last year, Poolside deliberately avoided the participation of large-scale companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon because "everyone is in the same race", and the company wants to develop independently.

This article is from the WeChat official account “Zhidx” (ID: zhidxcom), author: Li Shuiqing. Republished by 36Kr with permission.