No equity, no fee: Nvidia’s long bet on SEA’s AI startups

Tech in Asia recently caught up with Howard Wright, vice president of Nvidia Inception, the firm’s global startup program. The interview, which first appeared in our semiweekly AI newsletter, has been edited for length and clarity.

Nvidia needs no introduction, but its role in bridging startups, founders, enterprises, and investors is perhaps less known. Across Southeast Asia, the firm works with almost 2,000 startups – out of 50,000 worldwide. It also works closely with VCs to source deals through a global VC alliance, though the company couldn’t say which ones.

Among the Singapore-based startups accepted into the Inception program are robotics firm Sharpa, biotech company Hummingbird Bioscience, and deeptech startup SynaXG. Sharpa’s five-fingered robotic hands, known as Sharpa Wave, are integrated into H2 Plus, an open humanoid robot reference design developed by Nvidia and Unitree.

The program is free to join and doesn’t require founders to give up equity. Is there a catch?

When it comes to the challenges that AI startups in Southeast Asia face, what would you say is the biggest hurdle? Access to compute, talent, or funding?

It’s not talent. There’s a deep bench of talent from researchers, academics, and startups. I think the entire world is ready for Vera Rubin and ready for more compute, and we’re trying to find ways to do that on a big scale and a small scale.

There’s the monster Terafab that Elon [Musk] and others are building. Just last week in Germany, Jensen [Huang] announced the DSX pod – you can get your latest and greatest hardware and software in a pod, and, like a shipping container, you could put that right outside of your enterprise, behind a sports arena, or right down by the Formula 1 track.

So, from the full stack, worth hundreds of thousands of square meters of data centers, AI factories, the DSX pod, the DGX stations, all the way down to DGX Spark – what we’re trying to do is make sure that all of this is modular and folks can find sips of compute much easier than just waiting for an AI factory to be built, which takes multiple years.

Let’s talk about Inception. It’s free to join, and it doesn’t require startups to give up equity. What is the business case for it, and how do you measure success?

The goal of Inception, unapologetically, is to captivate the hearts and minds of the most important startups and the most important VCs and get them up and running on Nvidia technology.

It’s free because these startup founders need a co-traveler. We provide engineering support; we can help with their minimum viable product, their go-to-market strategy, funding, and board of directors.

We provide the resources for folks to go from Inception to unicorn or decacorn. In the 50,000+ startups that we have in the program, we are absolutely convinced that multiple trillion-dollar market cap companies reside, and it is our financial responsibility to help them find ways to succeed.

The business model is simple. We find them, we curate them. We embrace them, we nurture them. Eventually, they become the “AI natives” and the unicorns that are the single-verb unicorns that exist today. And they buy plenty of compute from Nvidia at that point. So think of us as that early-stage access to this startup ecosystem. Our horizon is much further out than this month or this week or this quarter.