Honeywell vs NVIDIA: Founders, CEOs and History
Honeywell was founded in 1906 by Albert Butz, Mark C. Honeywell and is led by Vimal Kapur. NVIDIA was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, Curtis Priem and is led by Jensen Huang.
Company facts
Founders
Honeywell
Albert Butz
Albert Butz was a Swiss-born American inventor whose work is the origin of Honeywell. In 1885 he patented the 'damper flapper', an early automatic thermostat mechanism for controlling indoor temperature.
Mark C. Honeywell
Mark C. Honeywell was an American industrialist who gave the company its name. He was a heating contractor, and in 1906 he founded the Honeywell Heating Specialty Company to make hot water heat generators.
NVIDIA
Jensen Huang
Nvidia possesses a gritty, prescient founding story, rooted entirely in a specific, technical conversation at a well-known American diner, and driven by a CEO who possessed an unshakable conviction in an unproven computational theory.
Chris Malachowsky
Chris Malachowsky co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 and became a central figure in the company's technical foundation.
Curtis Priem
Curtis Priem co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 and served as one of the company's original architects.
CEOs and their tenures
Honeywell
- David M. Cote2002–2017
Chairman and CEO
Under Cote Honeywell grew its market value and margins, and he handed the chief executive role to Darius Adamczyk in 2017.
Source - Darius Adamczyk2017–2023
Former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Adamczyk oversaw $7.5 billion in strategic divestitures to modernize Honeywell's portfolio and built the software-and-services strategy that his successor, Vimal Kapur, used as the technical foundation for the 2025-2026 three-way breakup -- the Forge platform…
Source - Vimal Kapur2023–present
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Kapur is notable among major American industrial CEOs for reaching the top of a Fortune 500 company without a MBA or an US university degree.
Source
NVIDIA
- Jensen Huang1993–present
CEO
Huang has been CEO for more than 33 years, which makes him one of the longest-serving founder-CEOs in the industry. Under him NVIDIA bet early on CUDA and deep learning, bought Mellanox for networking, and moved to a yearly architecture cadence.
Source - Chris Malachowsky1993–2024
Co-Founder
Chris Malachowsky co-founded Nvidia in 1993. As Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations, he played a critical role in developing the early graphics processing architecture and establishing Nvidia's robust engineering supply chain.
Source - Colette Kress2013–present
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
She has been CFO through NVIDIA's growth from about $4B of annual revenue to $215.9B in FY2026, and she leads its quarterly earnings communication with investors.
Source
Timeline: Honeywell and NVIDIA side by side
1885Honeywell
Albert Butz Patents the Damper Flapper Thermostat
Albert Butz files his first automatic temperature-control patent and forms the Butz Thermo-Electric Regulator Company, creating the thermostat as a mass-market product for home furnaces.
1906Honeywell
Honeywell Heating Specialty Company Founded
Mark C. Honeywell founds a heating-equipment business in Wabash, Indiana, that will later merge into the Honeywell name.
1927Honeywell
Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Company Formed
Mark Honeywell's heating business merges with the Electric Heat Regulator Company -- the descendant of Butz's original thermostat patents -- forming the direct ancestor of modern Honeywell, with W.R. Sweatt as chairman and Honeywell as president.
1993NVIDIA
Founding in Santa Clara
Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem founded NVIDIA on April 5, 1993, with a focus on 3D graphics for gaming and multimedia. The founding set the company on a parallel-processing path long before AI infrastructure became the main market.
1999Honeywell
AlliedSignal and Honeywell Combine
AlliedSignal acquires Honeywell in a roughly $15 billion stock deal and keeps the Honeywell name for the combined aerospace, materials, and controls conglomerate.
1999NVIDIA
GPU Category Defined
NVIDIA introduced the graphics processing unit concept in 1999. The milestone mattered because it framed graphics hardware as a specialized processor, a technical idea that later carried into accelerated computing and AI workloads.
2006NVIDIA
CUDA Opens GPUs to General Computing
CUDA opened GPU parallel processing to scientists, researchers, and developers outside graphics. It became the software foundation that made NVIDIA hardware useful for machine learning, simulation, and other compute-heavy workloads.
2012NVIDIA
AlexNet Shows GPU Value for Deep Learning
The AlexNet breakthrough used NVIDIA GPUs to win the ImageNet competition. The event helped convince researchers and engineers that GPUs could accelerate neural-network training at a scale CPUs could not match.
2016NVIDIA
DGX-1 AI Supercomputer
Nvidia introduced the DGX-1 deep-learning supercomputer in 2016, its first system built specifically for artificial intelligence.
2018Honeywell
Honeywell Forge Launched
then-CEO Darius Adamczyk launches Honeywell Connected Enterprise, which becomes Honeywell Forge, a cloud-based industrial IoT platform positioned as the company's top strategic priority for shifting toward recurring software revenue.
2018NVIDIA
RTX Brings Real-Time Ray Tracing to Graphics
NVIDIA RTX brought real-time ray tracing into the company's graphics roadmap. The product line kept gaming and professional visualization tied to AI-enhanced rendering while Data Center was becoming more important.
2020NVIDIA
Mellanox Acquisition Adds Networking
NVIDIA completed the Mellanox acquisition for about $7 billion. The deal mattered because large AI and high-performance-computing clusters depend on fast networking between accelerators, not only on individual GPU speed.
2022NVIDIA
Arm Acquisition Terminated
NVIDIA and SoftBank terminated the proposed Arm acquisition because of significant regulatory challenges. The failed deal showed how closely governments watch control points in semiconductor architecture.
2022NVIDIA
Hopper H100 Announced
Nvidia announced the Hopper-architecture H100 data-center GPU in March 2022.
2023NVIDIA
Grace CPU Enters Data Center Roadmap
NVIDIA introduced its first data-center CPU, Grace, for large-scale AI and high-performance computing. The milestone expanded the platform from GPUs and networking into CPU-GPU system design.
2024NVIDIA
Blackwell Architecture Launched
NVIDIA launched Blackwell as a data-center-scale architecture combining GPUs, CPUs, DPUs, interconnects, switch chips, systems, and networking adapters. The architecture became central to FY2026 Data Center demand.
2025Honeywell
Three-Way Breakup Announced
CEO Vimal Kapur announces a plan to split Honeywell into three independent public companies -- Aerospace, Solstice Advanced Materials, and automation-focused Honeywell Technologies -- following pressure from activist investor Elliott Management.
2025Honeywell
Advanced Materials Separated as Solstice
Honeywell completes the spin-off of its Advanced Materials business as the independent, Nasdaq-listed Solstice Advanced Materials on October 30, 2025.
2026Honeywell
Honeywell Aerospace Spin-Off Completed
Honeywell completes the Aerospace spin-off in June 2026, and the parent begins operating as the pure-play automation company Honeywell Technologies.
2026Honeywell
Quantinuum IPO
Quantinuum lists on Nasdaq as QNT, raising $1.68 billion at $60 per share; Honeywell deconsolidates it in Q2 2026.
2026Honeywell
Warehouse and PSS Businesses Sold
Honeywell Technologies sells Warehouse and Workflow Solutions (Intelligrated) to American Industrial Partners in July and PSS to Brady for $1.4 billion in August 2026.
2026NVIDIA
$215.9B FY2026 Revenue
NVIDIA reported $215.9 billion of FY2026 revenue, $193.7 billion of Data Center revenue, and $120.1 billion of net income. The result showed how far AI infrastructure had moved the company beyond its original PC graphics market.
Acquisitions
Honeywell
- Honeywell Aerospace spin-off2026Undisclosed
- Advanced Materials separation2025Undisclosed
- Access Solutions (Carrier Global)2024$5B
- Elster2015$5.1B
- Intermec2013$600M
- Pittway Corporation2000$2.2B
NVIDIA
- Groq (technology license and team)2025Undisclosed
- Run:ai2024$700M
- Excelero2022Undisclosed
- Mellanox Technologies2020$6.9B
- Cumulus Networks2020Undisclosed
- Icera2011$367M
Questions about Honeywell vs NVIDIA
Who is the CEO of Honeywell Technologies and NVIDIA Corporation?
Honeywell Technologies is led by Vimal Kapur and NVIDIA Corporation is led by Jensen Huang. Both serve as the top executive responsible for the company's strategy, operations, and financial performance.
When was Honeywell Technologies founded vs NVIDIA Corporation?
Honeywell Technologies was founded in 1906 — 87 years before NVIDIA Corporation, which was founded in 1993. Honeywell Technologies's longer operating history gives it a deeper track record but also potentially more institutional inertia compared to the younger NVIDIA Corporation.
How many employees does Honeywell Technologies have compared to NVIDIA Corporation?
Honeywell Technologies employs approximately 50,000 people, while NVIDIA Corporation employs approximately 42,000. Honeywell Technologies has the larger workforce at 50,000 employees, compared to NVIDIA Corporation's 42,000. A higher headcount does not necessarily imply greater efficiency — it often reflects differences in business model (e.g., manufacturing vs. software).
Where are Honeywell Technologies and NVIDIA Corporation headquartered?
Both Honeywell Technologies and NVIDIA Corporation are headquartered in United States, meaning they operate under the same primary regulatory and tax environment.
Who founded Honeywell Technologies and NVIDIA Corporation?
Honeywell Technologies was founded by Albert Butz, Mark C. Honeywell. NVIDIA Corporation was founded by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, Curtis Priem.
Which company has a longer operating history — Honeywell Technologies or NVIDIA Corporation?
Honeywell Technologies has been operating for approximately 120 years, making it the more established of the two companies. NVIDIA Corporation has been in operation for around 33 years. A longer operating history often signals greater institutional resilience and brand recognition, though it can also mean slower adaptation to new market conditions.
Figures come from each company's filings and the sources linked beside them. Amounts reported in another currency are shown in US dollars at an approximate rate and marked with ~. Back to the Honeywell vs NVIDIA overview