Companies seem to grow up fast these days.
Despite having only become a publicly traded company back in March, Coreweave (CRWV) said that it is already launching its own venture unit that will allow it to invest in founders and their companies that are on the frontlines of building out the AI ecosystem.
In addition to investment resources, CoreWeave Ventures will also provide support to startups through technical expertise and compute.
With a market cap of nearly $60 billion, the company certainly has the financial scale to invest in up-and-coming startups, even though it’s only about six months removed from its own IPO.
“We started CoreWeave with the conviction that AI’s true promise required a cloud platform built from the ground up to optimize for AI specific workloads,” Brannin McBee, co-founder and chief development officer for CoreWeave, said in a statement. “It took audacity, humility, and the support of other believers who helped us create the cloud platform of choice for many of the largest AI labs and enterprises.”
And now with CoreWeave Ventures, the AI hyperscaler is looking “to give other audacious, like-minded founders the support they need to drive technical advancements and bring to market the next class of innovation,” McBee added.
Along with capital investments to help them scale their operations, the startups will also get access to CoreWeave’s cloud platform, insights on product and go-to-market strategies, and the opportunity to gain access to technology partnerships and integrations.
CoreWeave will also offer the companies it invests in exposure to testing environments “across production-grade performance clusters to fast-track new real-world use cases in AI.”
“Working with CoreWeave has given us the freedom to think bigger and move faster,” Naeem Talukdar, co-founder and CEO of Moonvalley, said in a statement. “They understand the challenges of scaling breakthrough technologies and have backed us with the kind of support that lets us focus on innovation.”
In CoreWeave’s road to becoming a public company, it received substantial backing from Nvidia (NVDA), with the firm owning about 7% of the hyperscaler’s Class A shares as of June 30.
CoreWeave’s entire business structure has been built around buying up hundreds of thousands of Nvidia’s GPUs that it then rents out to clients.
And CoreWeave’s stock jumped nearly 8% on Monday as it disclosed in an SEC filing an order from Nvidia that will be worth at least $6.3-billion as part of an agreement that’s centered around all those GPUs that CoreWeave rents out.
The agreement guarantees that Nvidia will purchase any remaining cloud capacity that CoreWeave has not sold to customers, essentially protecting it from any scenario where there becomes lessening demand for AI computing capacity.
The AI chipmaker is obligated to purchase the residual unsold capacity through April 13, 2032, according to the filing.
"We see this as a positive for CoreWeave given concerns from investors around the company's ability to fill data center capacity beyond its two largest customers (Microsoft and OpenAI)," according to a note from Barclays analysts.
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