2024has been a good year for US-based technology powerhouse NVIDIA. The company has come a long way from their starting point in the world of videogames and computer graphics.
Starting out as a firm primarily focused on graphics cards and videogame software, the recent boom in artificial intelligence (AI) and AI speculation has driven Nvidia out of its niche and landed it with a market cap of $3.16 trillion as a whole. For context, that figure dwarfs one of the largest and most competitive healthcare companies in the scene, NovoNordisk, which itself vastly eclipses the GDP of its host country of Denmark.
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Given its exponential and rapid growth, Nvidia has been looking for ways and means of parsing that wealth out into sector-wide investments, in the hopes of maintaining continued growth across the sector as the company’s healthcare arm incubates and invests in numerous start-ups.
Incubating start-ups with plans to spin them out later has been a traditional and long-trusted means of taking immediate capital and sharing it out in the hopes that it will propel both companies forward. Now, the company’s Health and Lifesciences Incubation programme boasts more than 3,500 start-ups under its wing.
Speaking with Medical Device Network Nvidia’s healthcare and life sciences leader for the European, Middle Eastern and African regions, Dr Eva Maria Hempe, broke down how the company is incubating new generations of life science start-ups, and what’s ahead in 2025.
Joshua Silverwood: Tell me about your role and some of the work Nvidia has done with start-ups over the past year.
Eva Maria Hempe: In general, we have a huge ecosystem of start-ups. We think about start-ups in two layers. We have the general tier of our inception startup program, which is open to almost everyone. Our criteria for that is that you have to have a website, you have to have at least one developer, you have to be incorporated and you must be older than 10 years old as a company. If you tick all of those boxes you can apply.
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By GlobalDataThere is a small screening process where we try to understand whether what you are trying to do fits with what we are doing. Like if you’re doing, I don’t know, landscaping or something like that it may not be a great fit but if its something that fits with what we do then we are happy to have them join the Inception Programme, which gets them some benefits on things like training and discounts towards hardware or special programmes.
Then we have what we call the High Touch part, these are the start-ups that we think are particularly interesting and there we actually also we have our developer relations who are really working with the developer and looking at the code.
One example being Therapyside, where we really helped them to adopt right thinking and blueprints to make their architecture better. I just spoke with a colleague of mine who had an interesting conversation with a large pharma company who was also collaborating with a large range of start-ups. It turned out, that out of those startups, I think 5 out of 6, there’s things we can do and help them. Some of them were talking about building learning management systems for AI from scratch.
We tell these start-ups your so resource constrained, you should be using your your scarce resources on the things that really differentiate you and not just build something that you can also get off the shelf.
JS: Can you give me an idea then about how Nvidia’s technology can help with medical interventions or remote monitoring?
EMH: In the case of something like Therapyside, it’s about speech recognition. One thing to understand is that we are a platform company, we are providing building blocks, and we are helping people integrate those building blocks in in the best possible way.
Therapyside is a speech recognition model that transcribes the conversations and then we have as a language model, which summarises those sessions into clinical notes. So, it basically helps the therapist to remember things better. Like when a kid’s birthday was or certain titbits about the client so that they can have a better relationship. We are helping with some of the models and helping companies to stitch those together into something much more differentiating on the market.
JS: Does Nvidia have any plans to move into any specific growth areas in healthcare?
EMH: We like to consider healthcare in three buckets, the first one is digital biology. I’m a physicist by training. So, when I was at university, it took a PhD students three years to figure out the 3D structure of a protein, and now with AI we can do this in a few seconds. I can even do it on my phone because now I can access graphical processors (GPUs) somewhere in the cloud. This is super exciting and will have a huge impact on the drug discovery process. So, companies like Xenia and Insilico have been able to cut down the process of pre-clinical research from five years to 12-months. That is massive.
This is all about falling proteins and creating new molecules, figuring out how some of these proteins and molecules come together. There is one company I spoke to yesterday who want to do like an image of how the pocket in the protein looks like, where the molecule has to dock into and its whole 3D structure. They want to discover a molecule which fits into the pocket.
That’s interesting because that’s kind of turns everything on its head in terms of how we are doing things so far.
There’s this whole digital biology space and then we have the whole digital device space, which is the more mature part of our business. We have been working in this space for at least ten years, and built specific libraries and specific platforms for healthcare, but particularly in Europe, we’re very strong with the digital devices working with Siemens and GE to kind of design new imaging.
When it comes to start-ups we love all of our children, historically we have done a lot of work in medical devices, a lot of our internal R&D right now is looking a lot at digital biology, but we are really starting to look more and more into the things in between because things like digital health, that is the kind of place where the uses of AI become a lot more tangible quicker.”
Given the company’s rapid growth over the past year, its no wonder that it would begin to branch out of its previous technological safe spaces. At the start of 2024 the company sat at an approximate stock value of $48 per share in January, by the end of this year the company’s stock value rose to $133. Given that level and speed of growth and the more than 3500 start ups under the company’s brand, its likely that 2025 will mark another year of expansion for the new healthcare titan.
