- Founders: Michael Intrator; Brian Venturo; Brannin McBee
- Headquarters: Livingston, New Jersey, U.S
- Date founded: 2017
- Key people: Michael Intrator (CEO)
- Number of employees: 550 (2024)
- https://www.coreweave.com/
The first prominent AI initial public offering.
Ticker: CRWV
CoreWeave, which provides computing power for AI, was founded by three Bitcoin enthusiasts.
In 2017, Mr. Intrator, Mr. Venturo and Mr. McBee started the company Atlantic Crypto to mine cryptocurrencies. When crypto prices cratered two years later, they renamed the business CoreWeave and raised money to buy as many GPUs from distressed crypto miners as possible. Their bet: that the chips would eventually feed the development of artificial intelligence, whose creation also requires substantial computing power.
Michael Intrator is a founder and the chief executive of CoreWeave
- Unlike tech giants such as Nvidia and Google, which have many businesses, CoreWeave is known in industry parlance as a “pure AI play” because it has focused solely on AI chips and sells processing capacity to clients that want to build AI tools.
- Nvidia owns around 4 percent of the start-up and supplies most of its chips. Last week, CoreWeave also announced a deal to sell computing power to OpenAI worth up to $12 billion. As part of the agreement, OpenAI will take a $350 million stake in CoreWeave when it goes public.
The young company, which has raised $2.3 billion in venture capital and was last valued in the private markets at $19 billion, is expected to go public this month at a valuation of about $35 billion
CoreWeave’s big break came in 2021 when the hedge fund Magnetar invested $50 million. Then OpenAI released ChatGPT, shocking people with how the chatbot could answer questions, generate essays and compose love poems.
Demand for CoreWeave’s computing power skyrocketed. In the first five months of 2023, the company signed contracts with A.I. research labs and other customers totaling $7 billion
- Mr. Intrator, Mr. Venturo and Mr. McBee own 30 percent of the company, with a special class of shares giving them around 80 percent of the voting power. CoreWeave’s single largest shareholder is Magnetar, which has about a 25 percent stake.
- CoreWeave faces stiff competition from Amazon, Microsoft and Google, which also provide computing power. And its business is heavily dependent on a single customer — Microsoft, which generated 60 percent of CoreWeave’s revenue last year.