Cloud Computing Startup CoreWeave Prepares for 2025 IPO

The company, which was last valued at $19 billion, plans to interview investment banks to handle the offering later this year, the person said. A spokesperson for CoreWeave did not respond to a request for comment.

Founded seven years ago as a crypto mining operation, CoreWeave now runs at least 14 data centers filled with Nvidia’s coveted AI chips, renting out computing capacity to startups and other firms developing AI models and software. By designing the data centers around the Nvidia chips, CoreWeave claims its servers can process AI models faster and cheaper than rival cloud services.

The company has raised about $10 billion in equity and debt over the past year to cover the cost of buying Nvidia’s chips and building out the data centers. That includes more than $1 billion in equity from Wall Street investors such as Coatue and Magnetar, and $7.5 billion in debt from Blackstone, Carlyle and BlackRock that it raised this month. Nvidia is also a backer.

Coreweave has grown rapidly and last year projected $2.4 billion in 2024 revenue, The Information previously reported. Still, its growth prospects remain uncertain. CoreWeave is competing with an array of deep-pocketed tech firms, primarily larger cloud providers such as Microsoft and Amazon. In theory, CoreWeave as a private company has to raise debt and equity at higher prices than those companies, already rich in cash from their other business lines. “I would love to have access to their cost of capital,” Brannin McBee, co-founder, said of his competitors on a Bloomberg podcast last year.

Only a handful of high-profile tech firms have gone public since last fall, such as Reddit, Arm and Instacart, after a period of dormancy. StubHub, the ticketing marketplace, is likely to headline this summer’s lineup of tech IPOs, while fintechs like Klarna and Chime are highly valued contenders for next year.

Others, like Chinese e-commerce marketplace Shein, have hit political setbacks and are likely to list publicly in London rather than the U.S. Several firms such as Stripe, Databricks, Figma and Canva have allowed employees and early investors to sell shares privately rather than go public.

CoreWeave held its own secondary share offering in November, allowing employees to sell $642 million worth of shares, in a deal run by Morgan Stanley. CoreWeave has worked with law firm Fenwick & West on its private fundraising efforts so far.