Via aws.amazon.com
The chip giant's combined $7 billion commitment to the two-year-old AI startup signals just how aggressively Nvidia is moving to lock in software capabilities alongside its hardware dominance.
Nvidia has agreed to pay $6 billion to license AI models from Poolside AI, the software development-focused startup that barely existed two years ago. On top of that, Nvidia is putting another $1 billion in equity into the company, setting Poolside’s pre-money valuation at $12 billion.
That’s a fourfold valuation jump from the $3 billion mark Poolside hit just last year. For a company co-founded in early 2023, the trajectory looks less like a startup growth curve and more like a vertical line drawn with a ruler.
What Nvidia is actually buying #
The $6 billion licensing deal is non-exclusive, meaning Poolside can still sell its technology to other buyers. What Nvidia gets is access to Poolside’s “Model Factory,” the startup’s platform for producing generative AI models tailored to software development.
Poolside has been building out its Laguna family of models throughout 2026, including variants called Laguna XS.2 and M.1. These models are designed to write, debug, and optimize code, essentially turning AI into a software engineer’s co-pilot on steroids.
The talent grab nobody’s ignoring #
Beyond the dollars, 109 former Poolside employees received job offers from Nvidia as part of the deal. That’s not a small number for a startup, and it suggests Nvidia isn’t just interested in licensing models. It wants the people who know how to build them.
This kind of talent absorption has become a pattern in the AI industry. When you can’t acquire the whole company (or don’t want the regulatory headaches that come with it), you structure a deal that effectively brings in the expertise through licensing agreements and targeted hiring. Microsoft did something similar with Inflection AI in 2024, hiring most of the team while licensing the technology rather than executing a traditional acquisition.
Poolside was co-founded by Jason Warner and Eiso Kant, both with backgrounds in cybersecurity. The company raised a $500 million Series B in October 2024, a round that notably already included Nvidia as an investor. That earlier bet clearly went well enough for Nvidia to come back with a check roughly fourteen times larger.
Existing Poolside investors are set to receive a $76.20 per share payout by the end of 2027, a return that will make early backers very happy and late-stage venture partners slightly envious they didn’t write bigger checks.
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