Company history

Three people co-founded Nvidia in 1993:
Jen-Hsun Huang (As of 2008 CEO), previously Director of CoreWare at LSI Logic and a microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
Chris Malachowsky, an electrical engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems
Curtis Priem, previously a senior staff engineer and graphics chip designer at Sun Microsystems
The founders gained venture capital funding from Sequoia Capital.
In 2000, Nvidia acquired the intellectual assets of its one-time rival 3dfx, one of the biggest graphics companies of the mid- to late-1990s.
In July 2002, Nvidia acquired Exluna for an undisclosed sum. Exluna made software rendering tools and the personnel were merged into the Cg project.
In August 2003, Nvidia acquired MediaQ for aprox 70 Million.
On April 22, 2004, Nvidia acquired iReady, a provider of high performance TCP/IP and iSCSI offload solutions.
On December 14, 2005, Nvidia acquired ULI Electronics, which at the time supplied third-party southbridge parts for chipsets to ATI, Nvidia's competitor.
In March 2006, Nvidia acquired Hybrid Graphics
In December 2006, Nvidia, along with its main rival in the graphics industry AMD (which had acquired ATI), received subpoenas from the U.S. Department of Justice regarding possible antitrust violations in the graphics card industry.
Forbes magazine named Nvidia its Company of the Year for 2007, citing the accomplishments it made during the said period as well as during the previous 5 years.
On January 5, 2007, Nvidia announced that it had completed the acquisition of Portal Player, Inc.
In February 2008, Nvidia acquired Ageia Technologies for an undisclosed sum. "The purchase reflects both companies' shared goal of creating the most amazing and captivating game experiences," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia. "By combining the teams that created the world's most pervasive GPU and physics engine brands, we can now bring GeForce-accelerated PhysX to twelve million gamers around the world." (The press-release made no mention of the acquisition-cost nor of future plans for specific products.)
On January 10, 2011, NVIDIA signed a six-year cross-licensing agreement with Intel which marks the end of all outstanding legal disputes between these two companies. According to the agreement Intel will pay NVIDIA $1.5 billion in licensing fees payable in five annual installments.