TDK Ventures Founder Nicolas Sauvage Highlights Four-Year Timeline for Obvious Investments at San Francisco Event

Nicolas Sauvage, founder of TDK Ventures, shared his belief that it takes four years for the best bets to look obvious during StrictlyVC’s San Francisco event last week. Sauvage founded TDK Ventures in 2019 as the corporate venture arm of TDK, a Japanese electronics giant. The firm is managing $500 million across four funds.

TDK Ventures invested in Groq, an AI chip startup, in 2020. 9 billion during its most recent funding round last fall. Groq was founded by Jonathan Ross, one of the engineers who built Google’s Tensor Processing Units.

Groq focused from the start on inference. Sauvage described Groq's chip design as one where the architecture is stripped down until you can’t remove one part and have it still work. TechCrunch reported these details from the event, which TDK Ventures co-hosted.

Sauvage is French and joined TDK in Silicon Valley through an acquisition. He pitched the idea for TDK Ventures to higher-ups at TDK headquarters. Sauvage does not speak Japanese and does not live in Tokyo.

TDK Ventures’ mandate is to answer the question: What’s the next big thing for TDK, and what might kill it? TDK Ventures' portfolio includes Agility Robotics, which focuses on moving things from one place to another in warehouses. The portfolio also includes ANYbotics, which builds ruggedized robots for hazardous environments.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 is scheduled for October 13-15, 2026, in San Francisco, CA. Connie Loizos was named Editor in Chief and General Manager of TechCrunch in September 2023. StrictlyVC was acquired by Yahoo in August 2023.