Pulse News

**CoreWeave Founders Cashed Out Nearly $500 Million Before IPO**

Cloud provider files prospectus in highly anticipated offering expected later this month

By Cory Weinberg

Mar 3, 2025, 4:00pm PST

The three founders of CoreWeave will spend the next few weeks trying to sell investors on the cloud provider's future. What might make that job harder: They've already cashed out nearly a half-billion dollars from their stakes, between them.

CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator. Photo via Getty.

The founders—former commodities traders Mike Intrator, Brian Venturo, and Brannin McBee—have each sold at least $150 million worth of stock ahead of the cloud provider's planned initial public offering, the company's IPO prospectus showed Monday. The share sales are unusually high for startup founders ahead of a public offering.

**The Takeaway**

- CoreWeave founders sold nearly $500 million in stock before planned IPO

- Company's growth has soared amid demand for data centers to power artificial intelligence

- Share sales are unusually big for startup founders before offering

Andrea Lamari, managing partner of Cuatro Capital, an asset management and venture capital firm, said the CoreWeave founders' share sales appeared higher than other private AI companies she tracked. "This is a lot of chips off the table," she said. She added that the share sales could benefit other CoreWeave shareholders because the buyers of the shares included investors such as investment firm Fidelity Management, which is likely to buy more shares in the IPO.

A spokesperson for CoreWeave would not comment on the prospectus or the share sales. CoreWeave's founders, who started the company in 2017 as a crypto mining firm, appear to have benefited uniquely during a time of surging valuations for companies tied to the artificial intelligence boom. Its IPO is one of the most anticipated of the year.

CoreWeave's value surged from almost nothing to $23 billion in only a few years, after it landed multi-year contracts from tech firms like Microsoft and Meta, as well as financial firms like Jane Street, to rent Nvidia graphic processing units inside data centers CoreWeave operated. Its revenues soared by nearly 120 times in a three-year span, from just $16 million in 2022 to $1.9 billion in 2024. About 63% of the company's revenue last year came from Microsoft.

The founders' share sales helped make way for a longer list of established investors ahead of the public offering. CoreWeave held two large secondary share sales in 2023 and 2024, selling a combined $1.3 billion of existing shares to investors including Fidelity, BlackRock, and Coatue Management. Fidelity was the largest buyer of secondary shares, according to the prospectus.

CoreWeave didn't raise much venture capital. Its largest institutional investor is Magnetar Capital, an alternative asset manager, which appeared to own nearly one-quarter of the company's shares, according to the filing. The company had about $8 billion of debt on its balance sheet at the end of 2024. It burned about $6 billion in cash last year, measured by its operating cash flow minus capital expenditures.

Other tech investors include Nvidia, which appeared to own about 4% of the company's stock, as well as Altimeter, Lykos Global Management, and the family office of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The filing indicates that founders were still able to maintain majority voting control, despite selling down their stakes. Each sold between 11% and 16% of their stakes overall, according to an analysis by The Information. Combined, they have 82% of the voting power even though they only own a combined 30% of the company. They hold a special class of stock that gives each 10 votes per share, a common practice ahead of hot tech IPOs.

The filing describes the gross proceeds from the share sales "before any reduction for transaction costs, tax withholding, or amounts remitted to us in respect of the net exercise of employee stock options." The prospectus shows another early beneficiary of CoreWeave's rise has been the startup's board member Jack Cogen, former chief executive of Natsource, an asset manager for carbon credit projects. Cogen sold $176 million worth of shares, the filing shows. Intrator and Venturo also previously worked at Natsource.

Existing CoreWeave investors appear to have sought some assurances that the company's founders wouldn't immediately sell their holdings after the company's IPO. The three founders agreed to not sell more than 20% of their shares in the year following the company's IPO, a letter shared with investors last year showed.

The size of the stock sales ahead of the IPO are larger than other disclosures made in IPOs in recent years. Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, sold about $16 million of stock ahead of the company's IPO last year, its prospectus showed. The founders of ServiceTitan also sold stock in a tender offer ahead of its IPO, according to its prospectus, which didn't disclose the size of the sales. One of the most notorious founder share sales was done by Adam Neumann, who sold about $300 million in WeWork stock in the company's 2017 tender offer, Axios previously reported. The co-working office company's IPO failed two years later.

Cory Weinberg is deputy bureau chief responsible for finance coverage at The Information. He covers late-stage private tech firms, IPOs, and capital markets, and is based in New York. He has an MBA from Columbia Business School. He can be found on Twitter @coryweinberg. You can reach him on Signal at +1 (561) 818 3915.