Nvidia’s Venture Capital Arm Is Silently Investing Millions Into Healthcare

Nvidia has always sought to invest in valuable innovation. Its decades long dedication to building meaningful products and attempting to revolutionize the hardware industry has largely paid off; from its seminal work in gaming to its latest progress with chips that have been essential to the development of generative AI, the company has been successful without a doubt.

However, although most think of Nvidia as purely a hardware organization, the company is also rapidly investing resources in other arenas— and NVentures, which is the company’s venture capital arm, is leading the charge with numerous investments in healthcare.

The latest investment by the VC arm was announced earlier this month, which entailed a significant contribution, along with other investment partners, to Hippocratic AI, a company that is attempting to build a safety-focused large language model for healthcare. Specifically, Hippocratic AI aims to enable safe artificial Health General Intelligence (HGI) in order to “dramatically increase healthcare access and increase the scalability of healthcare professionals–resulting in a more equitable system of care for all.” The collaboration with Nvidia will enable the startup to “scale its production platform to deliver low-latency and long-context conversational capabilities…. [including] several techniques tailored for real-time, long-context conversational AI, including prefix caching, speculative decoding, and prefill/decode disaggregation.”

Nvidia’s Vice President of Healthcare, Kimberly Powell, explains, “Generative AI will expand the healthcare industry and its ability to serve the growing demands of patient care, and Hippocratic AI is putting the technology to work to increase access to healthcare..the company’s safety-focused approach uses advanced Nvidia technologies to make personalized, real-time patient interactions more natural and capable, helping build trust among patients and clinicians alike.”

NVentures has invested in many more potentially revolutionary companies. Another investment has been in Moon Surgical, a French company that is working on developing an advanced and cutting-edge robotic surgery system. Robotic surgery systems themselves are not new; in fact, Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci robot system is one of the most widely used platforms in the world and has revolutionized the field of minimally invasive surgery. Moon Surgical, which in fact has a founder of Intuitive Surgical on its Board of Directors, wants to redefine the future of the operating room by enabling efficiency and adaptive techniques. The partnership with Nvidia may unlock numerous capabilities, as it was already working with the company by leveraging its Clara Holoscan platform. Anne Osdoit, CEO of Moon Surgical mentions, “NVIDIA has all the hardware and software figured out, with an optimized architecture and libraries…Clara Holoscan helps us not worry about things we typically spend a lot of time working on in the medical-device development cycle.”

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Another investment example is in CHARM Therapeutics, which is focused on leveraging deep-learning capabilities to accelerate drug discovery. The partnership will enable CHARM to leverage Nvidia’s capabilities to use advanced machine learning to identify novel protein folding methods and thereby, enable the development of new therapeutics. Indeed, if successful, this provides Nvidia and CHARM to compete with the likes of other technology giants that are similarly interested in the intersection of computation science and biology, such as with Alphabet and Google DeepMind’s work on AlphaFold 3, or Meta’s work with the ESM Atlas.

NVentures is even getting involved with the field of medical imaging, realizing that this is one of the most data rich aspects of the healthcare industry. The company has invested in Flywheel, which is attempting to leverage AI to “turn complex imaging data into analysis-ready datasets for accelerated research and AI development.” As Mohamed “Sid” Siddeek, Corporate Vice President and Head of NVentures states, “The application of AI has led to the discovery of new drugs, identifying patterns in disease, and improvements in patient care…Flywheel uses AI to unlock the value within medical imaging data, signaling the continued benefit of applying AI across the healthcare industry.”

Most of the companies that NVentures has invested in, including these startups, provide a promising outlook for their respective technologies and their potentially expansive impact in healthcare. Moreover, with Nvidia as a collaborative partner, these companies will benefit significantly from the decades of experience that the technology and hardware giant brings to the table with regards to advanced computing. Congruently, for Nvidia, these investments represent opportunities to truly broaden the company’s already massive impact in the field of artificial intelligence and technology in general.