CoreWeave founders cashed out $150 million each before IPO

The three founders of CoreWeave, a cloud provider backed by Nvidia, are gearing up to pitch investors on the company’s future over the next few weeks. What could complicate their pitch: they’ve already pocketed close to half a billion dollars by selling off chunks of their stakes.

Mike Intrator, Brian Venturo, and Brannin McBee—ex-commodities traders turned tech entrepreneurs—each offloaded at least $150 million in stock before CoreWeave’s upcoming IPO, according to a report from The Information, which got a look at the company’s prospectus released Monday. That’s a hefty sum for founders to cash out before taking a startup public, and that kind of early payout isn’t typical ahead of an IPO—and it could raise eyebrows.

“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 Information reported.

This tidbit dropped just a day after The Information revealed CoreWeave’s wild ride in 2024—revenue shot up to eight times what it was the year before, hitting around $1.9 billion, based on what two insiders shared. Meanwhile, the company dumped nearly $8.5 billion into capital spending, almost triple what it shelled out the prior year. Talk about going big.

CoreWeave is set to roll out its IPO prospectus this week and hit the public market before March wraps up. Last year, we covered how the startup snagged a $650 million credit line to fuel its growth and beef up its data center lineup. The company stayed tight-lipped about the loan’s interest rate or payback schedule. Over the past 18 months, CoreWeave has hauled in $12.7 billion in funding, including a $1.1 billion round in May that pegged its value at $19 billion.

Intrator, Venturo, and McBee founded CoreWeave in 2017 to tackle a gap they saw in the cloud space. The company focuses on GPU-driven cloud services—those Nvidia chips now powering AI breakthroughs like ChatGPT. What started as a play for crypto mining has morphed into an AI-focused operation, riding the wave of ChatGPT’s success and the broader AI surge. Just in Q1 2023, AI startups collectively raised over $12 billion.

CoreWeave is now squaring up against heavyweights like Microsoft Azure and AWS, offering GPU muscle to AI outfits. By year-end, it aims to have 28 data centers running across the U.S. and beyond—think Austin, Chicago, Las Vegas, and London—with 10 more on deck for 2025. It’s already shipped GPUs to big names like Microsoft and France’s Mistral, per CNBC.

So, as the founders hit the road to woo investors, they’ve got a hot story to tell: explosive growth, big bets on AI, and a fat stack of cash already in their pockets. Whether that last part raises eyebrows or wins applause, it’s bound to keep the conversation lively.

CoreWeave Founders