CoreWeave co-founder explains how a closet of crypto-mining GPUs led to a $1.5B IPO

Summary

CoreWeave began trading on Friday with more of a shrug than a war cry. The company priced at $40 on Thursday, below the $47- $50 price range announced. It also trimmed the number of shares offered. All told, CoreWeave raised $1.5 billion and nabbed a $14 billion market cap on Day 1, instead of a hoped-for $3 billion+ raise and a much higher valuation. Shares also opened at $39 (ouch!), and closed at $40. A lukewarm reception. Still, the company’s IPO lands as the largest AI-related listing to date, and the biggest U.S. tech IPO since the heady days of 2021. Sitting in an ordinary white hoodie in a bland conference room, and talking with a detectable Jersey accent, Chief Strategy Officer Brian Venturo told TechCrunch that he feels very lucky. That’s because it all started when he and his hedge fund friends had some extra time on their hands after their last venture together went south. He had been working as portfolio manager for the energy industry hedge fund, Hudson Ridge, founded by CoreWeave cofounder and CEO Michael Intrator. They had built an ML model to help them pick investments in the data-heavy energy industry. There they met their cofounder, Brannin McBee, who ran the data firm they used. But after the U.S. veered into its fracking boom era, they closed Hudson Ridge, leaving “a lot of time on our hands,” Venturo says. Next up: crypto. The wanted to get in, but first “wanted to understand from the commodity side, how is this made,” Venturo said. “So we started doing mining on the pool table in our Manhattan office.” Thousands of GPUs in a warehouse Like eating potato chips, one GPU turned into 10. Ten turned into 1,000. The rigs moved from pool table to closet. “Next thing we knew, we were in the most cliche place possible. We were in my grandfather’s garage in New Jersey,” he joked. Then their friends in finance wanted in so they bought more. “We were the largest Ethereum miner in the world for like two and a half years,” he says. “At one point, we had 50,...