Before cofounding CoreWeave, CEO Michael Intrator worked at asset managers with strategies in the natural gas and carbon credit markets.
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Cloud computing startup CoreWeave’s three cofounders—Michael Intrator, Brian Venturo and Brannin McBee—and board member Jack Cogen are now billionaires, Forbes estimates, according to information revealed about their stakes and private market sales in the company’s initial public offering prospectus filed Monday.
CEO Intrator, Chief Strategy Officer Venturo and Chief Development Officer McBee own 15%, 9% and 7% of CoreWeave’s shares, respectively, while Cogen owns 5%. CoreWeave hasn’t yet priced its public stock offering, but based on a private market sale of some CoreWeave shares in October that implied a valuation of around $20 billion, the four men hold stakes in CoreWeave’s worth more than $1 billion each. They’ve also cashed out more than the typical pre-IPO founder does: the three cofounders and Cogen each sold more than $150 million of CoreWeave’s shares (before taxes) as part of private market sales in 2023 and 2024.
Per Forbes’ estimates, Intrator is now worth $3.1 billion, Venturo is worth $2 billion, McBee is worth $1.5 billion and Cogen is worth $1.2 billion. A spokesperson for CoreWeave did not respond to a request for comment.
CoreWeave’s cofounders didn’t expect to create a company at the forefront of the AI boom. In 2017, the three then-commodity traders had amassed a stockpile of Nvidia chips to mine cryptocurrency for their new company, Atlantic Crypto. Two years later, they renamed it CoreWeave and shifted the business model to building data centers and selling computing power to companies that didn’t have enough of their own GPU servers–storage systems comprised of electronic circuits called Graphics Processing Units. After OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022 and unleashed something of an AI firestorm, CoreWeave’s customers were, increasingly, AI companies. Now, according to the company’s new filing, CoreWeave’s biggest customers are Microsoft, IBM, Meta, NVIDIA and billion-dollar AI labs Cohere and Mistral.
“What we did is we said, ‘Hey, there’s a new and emergent way that compute is going to be used in the future,” Intrator told Forbes in 2024. “What are they going to need to be as successful as possible?’”
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As the demand for GPUs grew, CoreWeave found itself in the right place at the right time. As the result of several rounds of investments, its valuation ballooned from around $2 billion in May 2023 to $19 billion in May 2024—and, according to Reuters, it may aim for a $35 billion or higher valuation when it goes public. Revenue, too, spiked, from $230 million in 2023 to $1.92 billion in 2024, per the IPO filing. But so did net losses, which grew nearly 50% to $860 million in 2024. It’s expensive to build data centers, and CoreWeave has 32 of them running more than 250,000 GPUs as of the end of 2024.
CoreWeave’s cofounders are all billionaires in part because of the company’s massive valuation, which could make it one of the biggest IPOs since public markets slowed in 2022. But they were also able to retain enough of the company’s shares because they didn’t raise as much equity funding as a typical venture-backed tech company. According to the filing, CoreWeave raised $14.5 billion in funding over 12 financings—but more than two-thirds was debt. CoreWeave’s latest big funding round, for example, was a $7.6 billion debt round led asset managers Magnetar, CoreWeave’s first and biggest backer, and Blackstone; per the IPO document, it was “one of the largest private debt financings in history.” Another CoreWeave investor of note: Les Wexner, the Victoria’s Secret billionaire who stepped down from his company L Brands in 2020 amid scrutiny over his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and played a crucial role in one of the biggest semiconductor projects in history. He now owns a 4.4% stake in the company via the Linden West Trust, which was set up for Wexner’s descendants.
CoreWeave faces deep-pocketed competition, particularly from cloud providers such as Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s Amazon Web Services (AWS). CoreWeave’s future also depends especially heavily on one customer: In 2024, more than 60% of its revenue came from Microsoft, which has leaned on CoreWeave amid its struggles to get enough GPU capacity for its customers. Although Microsoft plans to spend $10 billion on CoreWeave servers through 2030, according to The Information, its CEO Satya Nadella said that external sources of processing power and storage (aka “compute”) like CoreWeave are a “one-time” band-aid, speaking on the BG2 podcast in December. In the meantime, Microsoft’s own cloud provider, Azure, is working to “get caught up with demand,” he added.