Nvidia Pays Poolside $6B To License Its Model Factory And 109 Workers

Four months ago, Poolside could not close a $2 billion funding round. Last week, Nvidia agreed to pay the same startup $6 billion to license its software, and to put another $1 billion into the company at the $12 billion valuation that failed round had chased. Job offers went out to more than 100 of its engineers. The founders keep the company. Nvidia gets the software, the people, and a stake in whatever is left.

Poolside builds AI models that write code. The licensed software, an internal system called Model Factory, is the machinery Poolside used to build those models. The engineers and the machinery are headed to the same destination inside Nvidia: Nemotron, its family of open-weight models, which anyone can download and run without paying for them. Nvidia just spent $7 billion on models it plans to give away.