CoreWeave began trading on Friday, marking the largest AI-related listing to date, with a more subdued response than expected. The company priced at $40 below its initial target price range of $47-50, and trimmed the number of shares offered. Despite this, CoreWeave raised $1.5 billion and secured a $14 billion market cap on Day 1.
CoreWeave’s co-founder and CEO Michael Intrator, along with Chief Strategy Officer Brian Venturo, had a humble start. After their energy industry hedge fund venture went south, they turned to cryptocurrency mining as a side hustle. They began with just a pool table in their Manhattan office and gradually scaled up to a warehouse of thousands of GPUs.
The team’s foray into cryptocurrency led them to meet EleutherAI, an open-source group working on large language models (LLMs). In exchange for access to GPUs, CoreWeave gained expertise in AI training. This partnership proved crucial, as it introduced the company to paid customers and sparked a new business direction.
CoreWeave has since established itself as a leading AI training infrastructure provider, with 32 data centers and 250,000 GPUs. The company has also landed major clients like Microsoft and OpenAI, which signed a $12 billion deal with CoreWeave in recent times.
Despite the significant debt of $7.6 billion, which is largely due for repayment within two years, Venturo insists that CoreWeave’s customer deals cover the costs. He attributes his company’s success to a combination of luck and strategic partnerships. As he aptly puts it, “There’s so much luck along the way, it’s crazy.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/29/coreweave-co-founder-explains-how-a-closet-of-crypto-mining-gpus-led-to-a-1-5b-ipo