Nicolas Sauvage, founder of TDK Ventures, steers a $500 million portfolio that bets on the quiet corners of AI. Since 2019 he has chased technologies that become obvious only after four years, a theory he outlined at StrictlyVC’s San Francisco event. The flagship example is Groq, an inference‑chip firm backed early by Sauvage.

Groq, valued at $6.9 billion last fall, focuses on inference—the heavy lifting every model does when it answers a query. Sauvage spotted its long‑term edge because inference demand compounds with each new application, unlike consumer hardware that hits a ceiling. Meanwhile, CPUs are poised for a renaissance as orchestration engines for complex AI agents.

By funding niche robotics that perform single, reliable tasks, and by backing next‑generation battery chemistries, Sauvage keeps TDK Ventures positioned where manufacturing speed and physical AI converge. The result is a portfolio that turns today’s bottlenecks into tomorrow’s competitive advantages, delivering tangible returns for investors across multiple sectors, reinforcing its market leadership in the tech ecosystem and securing a foothold in emerging AI hardware markets while maintaining a disciplined investment thesis.