Nvidia’s head of investor relations and strategic finance is leaving the booming chip company for a startup.

Simona Jankowski, vice president at Nvidia, announced her departure from the chipmaker after seven years for a chief financial officer role at a startup. The move “was not an easy decision,” Jankowski said in a LinkedIn post on Monday. Jankowski did not name the startup yet but said she would in a future post.

As a Goldman Sachs equity research analyst in 2001, Jankowski said her first assignment was building Nvidia’s financial model. Jankowski met Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang at the time and tracked the company’s stock performance throughout the 2000s, she said. In 2017, she left Goldman Sachs to join the chipmaker. Since then, Jankowski said, the company’s revenue has increased over tenfold, and its earnings and market cap have jumped by more than 20 times.

“Perhaps even more impressively, the AI compute performance delivered by NVIDIA’s flagship GPU is up over 1,000X, while the size of frontier AI models has grown by over 20,000X,” she wrote.

Jankowski said working with Huang “has been the experience of a lifetime” and added that the chipmaker has kickstarted what Huang calls a “new industrial revolution.”

Nvidia recently joined the $3 trillion market cap club with Apple and Microsoft, briefly surpassing both to become the most valuable public company in the world by market cap.

Nvidia became the first semiconductor company to reach a $2 trillion valuation after it reported record fourth-quarter earnings in February. It also beat Wall Street’s expectations in May, reporting record first-quarter revenue of $26 billion for fiscal year 2025 — up 262% from the year before.

However, Nvidia’s shares are sliding this week, and its market cap has dropped to $3 trillion, back below Microsoft’s $3.3 trillion, and Apple’s $3.2 trillion.