CoreWeave’s first S-1 documentation on upcoming IPOs is full of surprises.
NVIDIA-backed, CoreWeave runs AI-specific cloud services from a network of 32 data centers. It has over 250,000 NVIDIA GPUs as of the end of 2024. Since then, Blackwell, Nvidia’s latest product that supports AI inference, has also been added.
Although we don’t know how many shares CoreWeave is planning to sell, or how many shares it will still be, Renaissance Capital’s IPO experts estimate the company has raised at least $3.5 billion at a $32 billion valuation, possibly over $4 billion.
As Reuters reported, it is not a major leap around the final valuation in November, when it closed its $650 million secondary share sale valued at $23 billion.
One surprise from the filing is that the three co-founders of the company have already sold many of their Class A holdings between the public offer in 2024 and one held in 2023. No matter what happens with this IPO, the co-founder has already cashed out $488 million worth of shares.
Specifically, across both bid offers, co-founder CEO and chairman Michael Intrator sold approximately $160 million worth of shares. Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Brian Venturo sold approximately $177 million worth of shares. Co-founder and Chief Development Officer Brannin McBee also sold approximately $151 million worth of shares.
Despite owning less than 3% of Class A shares, the trio will maintain control of the company through a majority of CoreWeave’s Class B shares, which earns 10 votes per share. Together, they currently control about 80% of the votes.
Another unusual thing about this company: three backgrounds actually lie in finance rather than technology. They come from hedge funds in the oil industry. Prior to CoreWeave, the intrators worked with Venturo to establish and run a natural gas hedge fund. McBee was previously a trader for another such hedge fund, says S-1.
To bolster their technical chops, they hired Chen Goldberg from Google Cloud as Senior Vice President of Engineering at CoreWeave. She previously led Google’s Kubernetes and serverless team.
Nvidia has more than 6% stake in CoreWeave and is also a CoreWeave user. This is a powerful alliance. With the hard-to-earn Nvidia GPU cache, CoreWeave enjoys eye-opening revenue growth. It was $1.9 billion in 2024, an eight-fold increase from just $228.9 million in 2023.
But as others have pointed out, Microsoft, a single customer, accounts for 62% of its revenue. And interestingly, CoreWeave named Microsoft both as a customer and a competitor.
Still, CoreWeave’s customer list is envious of its customers, including Cohere, Meta and Mistral.
Despite its revenue growth, CoreWeave remains unrecorded a massive loss of $863 million in 2024 alone, and it has $7.9 billion in debt on its books.
Founders use their financial expertise to frame their debts as a function rather than a burden. They even call their finances “sophisticated” and “exploring loans covered in GPU infrastructure.” Their GPU collection is invaluable and can be used as collateral.
Still, the debt is provided at a sudden cost. In 2024 alone, it has contributed to the company’s losses of $941 million. CoreWeave says it could use at least a portion of the money raised through the IPO to reduce its debt burden.
We don’t know how hot this is yet. But people want to support companies that are currently generating a huge amount of revenue for AI, and CoreWeave definitely does.
CoreWeave declined to comment further.
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