YeKanEast - Nostr Hypermedia

Social Capital put $10M into Groq’s seed round in April 2017 when the company was worth roughly $30M post-money. That single check bought about 33% of the company. Then they doubled down with $52.3M in a 2018 convertible note. Total deployed: $62.3M. Here’s where it gets interesting. Groq raised $300M at $1.1B in 2021, then $640M at $2.8B in 2024, then $750M at $6.9B in September 2025. Each round diluted early investors. But Social Capital had board seats and likely maintained some pro-rata through the convertible. Conservative math: They own somewhere between 15-20% of Groq today. At $20B, that’s $3B to $4B in value. $62M in. $3-4B out. That’s a 50-65x return in 8 years. For context, this single investment is worth more than Social Capital’s entire fund size in 2015 ($1.1B). One bet. Eight years. 50x. The timing is the wildest part. Chamath invested in custom AI chips in 2017, years before ChatGPT made inference compute a thing. He sat on the board until 2021, then stepped back right as the company was entering its growth phase. Now Nvidia is paying $20B in cash because they need Groq’s LPU architecture for inference at scale. Jensen is essentially writing Chamath a check for being early on the inference bottleneck.