CoreWeave, an AI-focused cloud provider with backing from Nvidia, filed late Monday for its much-anticipated initial public offering. With plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker "CRWV," CoreWeave is likely to be among the biggest tech IPOs this year.
New Jersey-based CoreWeave rents cloud-computing capacity powered with Nvidia chips to AI developers. The company has seen a big jump in sales as companies race to train AI models. CoreWeave's revenue grew more than 700% year-over-year to $1.9 billion in 2024, according to its IPO prospectus filing. The company posted a net loss of $863 million for 2024.
The company has not yet listed the number of shares or price it will target in the listing. Bloomberg reported last week that CoreWeave's IPO filing was imminent, with the company likely to seek a valuation of more than $35 billion. CoreWeave raised private funding in November at a reported valuation of $23 billion.
CoreWeave IPO: From Crypto To AI
Founded in 2017 as Atlantic Crypto, CoreWeave initially focused on cryptocurrency mining. But in 2019, the company shifted its focus to offering cloud access to high-powered graphics processing units, or GPUs.
That positioned CoreWeave for growth with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, which set off a race among tech giants and startups to train massive large language models for AI tools.
"For AI to reach its full potential, it needs a purpose-built AI cloud platform with infrastructure and managed cloud services that are delivered in an efficient, automated, and highly performant way," the company's leadership wrote in its IPO filing. "Enter CoreWeave, the AI Hyperscaler."
The company's cloud offering is powered by its 32 data centers with more than 250,000 GPUs from Nvidia as of the end of last year, according to its filing.
CoreWeave warned potential investors, however, that it derives 77% of revenue from two customers. The biggest is Microsoft, which accounted for 62% of CoreWeave's revenue. Microsoft's Azure cloud business is a much-larger competitor to CoreWeave. But Microsoft reportedly turned to CoreWeave starting in 2023 to help meet demand for the computing power needs of ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
CoreWeave's other customers named in the IPO filing include AI startup Cohere, Meta Platforms, IBM and Nvidia.
Nvidia is also an investor, with a roughly 6% stake in CoreWeave, according to the filing.
IPO Market: Will More Tech Unicorns Follow?
CoreWeave's offering will be the highest-profile technology IPO so far this year. So-called tech unicorns — startups with a private valuation of over $1 billion — have been slow to go public since the 2021 bull market faded.
There is hope among investors, however, that 2025 will see more major debuts. Along with CoreWeave, fintech company Klarna is expected to test an IPO soon.
Read more on the 2025 IPO market outlook here.
