Poolside AI has struck a non-exclusive $6 billion licensing deal with Nvidia, alongside a $1 billion investment at a $12 billion pre-money valuation, according to a Newcomer exclusive1. As part of the arrangement, 109 Poolside staffers have received Nvidia job offers.
The deal structure is unusual. Latent Space characterized it as a "reverse-execuhire" — a contrast to recent transactions in which executives typically depart while employees remain with the company2. In this case, the employees are moving to Nvidia while the founders stay behind.
Poolside co-founder Eiso Kant said in a recent podcast appearance that fewer than 70 people built the company's model, with fewer than 115 between engineering and research contributing to the effort. The 109 staffers receiving Nvidia offers would account for what Latent Space described as "the overwhelming majority of the technical Poolside employees".
The founders have stated that the transaction is "not an acquisition and not an acquihire". Latent Space reported that the arrangement amounts to the founders "pivoting the company extremely hard" while providing what it called an "extremely comfortable golden parachute for investors and employees".
Latent Space drew comparisons to other recent deals in the AI sector — specifically the Windsurf-Google, Character-Google, Scale-Meta, and Instacart-OpenAI transactions — which it has termed "execuhires" because executives departed while employees stayed with the remaining company. The Poolside-Nvidia deal inverts that pattern.
The licensing deal is non-exclusive, meaning Poolside retains the ability to license its technology to other parties.
ANALYSIS The scale of the transaction — $6 billion in licensing plus $1 billion in investment — places this among the largest AI talent and technology deals to date. The non-exclusive nature of the license preserves optionality for whatever Poolside's founders intend next, while the departure of the bulk of the technical team to Nvidia raises questions about the company's near-term capacity to continue model development at its prior pace.