CoreWeave, a New York-based startup originally involved with Ethereum mining, has received a substantial investment as the company continues to change its focus to general cloud computing. The Series B funding round was driven by Magnetar Capital, who invested a total of $111 million, with the rest of the money being split between Nvidia, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross. This funding brings CoreWeave’s total raised to $371 million, as well as a pre-money value of the company at $2 billion.
The money will be used to extend CoreWeave’s existing data center network in the US. The company currently operates five of them in North America, and two more are planned to open in 2021. CoreWeave was previously only involved with cryptocurrency-related activities, but eventually moved towards offering general cloud computing services. These include over a dozen Nvidia GPU SKUs for use in AI, machine learning, visual effects, and 3D streaming.
In the cloud computing industry, it can be difficult to compete with the major companies like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. All of said companies have far more resources and market share (AWS made $80.1 billion in revenue, Google Cloud and Azure made $75.3 and $26.3 billion respectively). CoreWeave attempts to separate themselves through services like machine learning acceleration, as well as specialized hardware and autoscaling within three seconds.
The CEO of CoreWeave, Mike Intrator, claims that the traditional cloud providers are not equipped to meet the needs of customers who require GPUs. He also mentions that they employ over 115 people, and plan to continue hiring in 2021.
company mentioned in this article
CoreWeave Technologies is a NYC-based cloud computing company that was founded in 2017 by Mike Intrator, Brian Venturo and Brannin McBee. The company initially began as an Ethereum mining venture, but shifted focus to become a general-purpose cloud computing platform. CoreWeave offers a variety of services, such as access to a dozen SKUs of Nvidia GPUs, machine learning acceleration, specialized hardware and autoscaling of AI models within three seconds. The company had a successful round of funding recently and is now valued at $2 billion.
person mentioned in this article
Nat Friedman is an American software developer and entrepreneur. He is the former CEO and co-founder of Xamarin, as well as the former CEO of GitHub, where he led the merger with Microsoft in 2018. Nat is an active investor and has put money into several companies, such as CoreWeave. Additionally, he is the chairman of the board for Free Software Foundation and a principal software engineer at Microsoft.
