NEAR Joins NVIDIA Inception Program for AI Startups, Access to Investors

Key Notes

• NEAR gains access to NVIDIA’s GPU resources, technical support, and potential venture capital connections through the partnership.
• The collaboration builds on existing integration of NVIDIA Confidential Computing within NEAR‘s AI infrastructure stack.
• NEAR token surged 7% following the announcement, with trading volume reaching $270 million in 24 hours.

NEAR AI announced it is joining NVIDIA’s Inception Program designed to foster growth of artificial intelligence startups in different stages.

From NEAR’s side, joining the program strengthens its mission of developing verifiable, privacy-preserving tools for AI, according to the announcement on January 13.

“Through the program, NEAR AI gains access to NVIDIA’s technical expertise, advanced tooling, and GPU resources, enabling us to accelerate development while meeting the rigorous performance, security, and reliability standards required by enterprise users,” the team wrote.

This step also places NEAR closer to a privileged position among NVIDIA’s venture capital (VC) network—based on eligibility—and access to specialized investors and NVIDIA executives in networking events, according to the program description on its official landing page.

Notably, NEAR and NVIDIA’s relationship is not new and NVIDIA Confidential Computing is described as a “core component of the NEAR AI stack,” which enables AI workloads to run inside hardware-isolated, trusted execution environments, protecting data at rest, in transit, and also during computation, “a critical requirement for enterprise and government use cases,” the blog post explains.

NEAR AI Cloud’s verifiable privacy has already been adopted by Brave Browser and other notable enterprises, as Coinspeaker reported in December 2025. Moreover, Solana’s official account teased a NEAR integration later last year by sharing a picture of NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang talking to NEAR’s co-founder Illia Polosukhin—co-author of the groundbreaking “Attention is All You Need” AI paper—highlighting the relationship between the two industry leaders.

NEAR Price Analysis

As for the native token, NEAR NEAR $1.85 24h volatility: 8.5% Market cap: $2.37 B Vol. 24h: $287.93 M is changing hands at $1.83, up more than 7% in the last 24 hours, with a price rally intensifying following the recent announcement of the project joining NVIDIA’s Inception Program.

NEAR 24-hour price chart as of January 13, 2025 | Source: CoinMarketCap”>

NEAR 24-hour price chart as of January 13, 2025 | Source: CoinMarketCap

The trading volume has also seen a significant increase reaching $270 million intraday, up 11% from yesterday’s trading activity. This current volume accounts for 11% of NEAR’s $2.35 billion market capitalization, positioning the asset in the 39th rank according to CoinMarketCap.

NEAR has gained attention from relevant market participants lately thanks to the NEAR Intents success and has improved its tokenomics with an approved inflation halving on October 28, 2025, reducing the token’s annual tail emission from 5% to 2.5%, receiving 80% approval from the network’s validators.

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