Uber's Advanced Technologies Group absorbed years of capital in the race for self-driving vehicles, raised $1 billion at a $7.25 billion valuation, and was ultimately sold to Aurora. The technology survived, but the ownership model changed.
Microsoft's $1 billion OpenAI investment in 2019 was more than a venture check: it tied frontier-model research to Azure supercomputing, licensing, and product distribution, helping reopen the AI platform race.
Nvidia's Mellanox acquisition turned high-speed networking into a core part of its data-center strategy. What looked like a $6.9 billion interconnect deal became foundational to the architecture of large AI systems.
Salesforce's $15.7 billion all-stock acquisition of Tableau was a bet that analytics would become inseparable from CRM. The return has unfolded through product integration, data-platform strategy, and eventually agentic analytics.
Google's $2.1 billion Fitbit acquisition was a bet on owning a credible health-and-wearables layer around Android. Regulatory commitments limited data use, while Fitbit's technology later became central to Google's Pixel Watch strategy.