NVIDIA

Nvidia was founded on April 5, 1993, by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. The three co-founders met in late 1992 at a Denny's diner in San Jose, California, where a compelling vision for graphics-based processing as the future of computing inspired Huang to leave his stable job and become CEO of their new startup. They recognized that video games presented both a computationally challenging problem and a high-volume market, making it their "killer app" to fund extensive R&D.

Beginning with just $40,000, the company soon secured $20 million in venture capital. Nvidia quickly entered a burgeoning market where about 70 startups were competing to develop graphics acceleration for video games. Their initial product, the NV1, utilized quadrilateral primitives, a departure from the emerging industry standard of triangle primitives, which Microsoft's DirectX platform adopted. This design choice led to the NV1's commercial failure, putting the fledgling company in a precarious financial state.

In a critical turnaround, after a failed partnership with Sega for the Dreamcast console, Sega's president not only chose another vendor but also invested $5 million in Nvidia, providing them a much-needed lifeline. This allowed Huang to drastically pivot the company, laying off more than half the staff and refocusing entirely on developing the RIVA 128, a graphics accelerator optimized for triangle primitives. Its release in 1997, just as the company was down to a month's payroll, proved a massive success, selling about a million units and ensuring Nvidia's survival and subsequent growth.