Inside Nvidia’s plan to give $100K to the next hot emerging startup (interview)

Nvidia will hold its sixth annual Emerging Companies Summit at its GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, Calif., in late March. And while the world’s biggest maker of standalone graphics chips often invests in companies working on cool graphics, this marks the first time that it will give away $100,000 in an on-stage bake-off among startups competing to be the best emerging company.

Jeff Herbst, vice president of business development, will lead the summit and be a judge in its Early Stage Challenge contest, where 12 companies will gather on stage to compete for the prize. Nvidia has had some successes with its investments lately — the biggest was Zynga’s $527 million purchase of NaturalMotion, a mobile game developer that Nvidia invested in early on.