Ahead of a possible $4 billion IPO, CoreWeave’s founders already pocketed $488 million | TechCrunch

CoreWeave’s initial S-1 document for its upcoming IPO is full of surprises.

Backed by Nvidia, CoreWeave runs an AI-specific cloud service from its network of 32 data centers that together have more than 250,000 Nvidia GPUs as of the end of 2024, according to the company. Since then, it has also added a number of Nvidia’s latest product, Blackwell, which supports AI reasoning.

While we don’t know yet how many shares CoreWeave plans to sell or at what price, the IPO specialists at Renaissance Capital estimate the company hopes to raise at least $3.5 billion at a $32 billion valuation, and possibly over $4 billion. 

That’s a big, but not crazy big, leap over its last valuation in November when it closed a $650 million secondary share sale that valued it at $23 billion, as reported by Reuters.

One surprise from the filing is that the company’s three co-founders have already sold off much of their Class A holdings between that 2024 tender offer and one held in 2023. Whatever happens in this IPO, the co-founders have already cashed out nearly $488 million worth of shares. 

Specifically, across both tender offers, co-founder CEO and chairman Michael Intrator sold about $160 million worth of shares; co-founder and chief strategy officer Brian Venturo sold about $177 million worth of shares; and co-founder and chief development officer Brannin McBee sold about $151 million worth of shares.

Despite now owning less than 3% of the Class A shares, the trio will retain control of the company through their majority ownership of CoreWeave’s Class B shares, which carry 10 votes per share. Together, they currently control about 80% of the votes.

Another unusual thing about this company: The backgrounds of the three are actually in finance, not tech. They hail from oil industry hedge funds. Before CoreWeave, Intrator founded and ran a natural gas hedge fund, working with Venturo. McBee was previously a trader at another such hedge fund, the S-1 says.

To bolster their technical chops, they hired Chen Goldberg from Google Cloud as CoreWeave’s senior vice president of engineering. She had been previously leading Google’s Kubernetes and serverless team.

Nvidia has a stake of more than 6% in CoreWeave and is also a CoreWeave user — a powerful alliance. With a cache of hard-to-get Nvidia GPUs, CoreWeave has enjoyed eye-popping revenue growth: $1.9 billion in 2024, nearly an eightfold increase from just $228.9 million in 2023.

However, as others have pointed out, a single customer, Microsoft, accounted for 62% of that revenue. And interestingly, CoreWeave named Microsoft both a customer and a competitor, as it did with IBM. 

Even so, CoreWeave’s customer list is enviable, and also includes Cohere, Meta, and Mistral, it says.

Despite that revenue growth, CoreWeave remains unprofitable, logging hefty losses of $863 million in 2024 alone. And it has a painful $7.9 billion in debt on its books. 

The founders, leveraging their financial expertise, frame that debt as a feature and not a burden. They call their finances “sophisticated” and even go so far as to say they “pioneered GPU infrastructure-backed lending.” Their GPU collection is so valuable, they can use it as collateral.

Still, servicing that debt comes at a steep cost — $941 million in 2024 alone, contributing to the company’s losses. CoreWeave says it may use at least some of the money raised in the IPO to reduce its debt burden.

How hot of an IPO this will be remains to be seen. But people are eager to back any company generating loads of revenue on AI at the moment, and CoreWeave is definitely doing that. 

CoreWeave declined further comment.