CoreWeave, a New York City-based startup that started as an Ethereum mining company, has secured another $200 million in financing in the wake of the ongoing AI boom.
The funding, which pushes the valuation of the company to more than $2 billion, comes weeks after the startup raised $221 million in a Series B funding package to finance the expansion of its U.S. data centers. The April funding round was supported by investors such as Magnetar Capital and Nvidia.
CoreWeave, established in 2017 by Intrator, Brian Venturo, and Brannin McBee, is dedicated to providing cloud computing services based on graphics processing units GPUs, the technology that pioneered by Nvidia that has become central to AI services like OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Brannin McBee, co-founder and chief strategy officer at CoreWeave, said the company will use the capital infusion to finance its expansion to build six data centers across the U.S. and for potential future acquisition opportunities. McBee said the company is in talks with lenders to raise debt for GPU purchases.
We re the only provider of that infrastructure at scale and an InfiniBand environment, Mr. McBee said. Nvidia wants their product to be as good as possible and accessible. We hit both those checkboxes for them the way no one else does. The cryptocurrency mining industry has experienced substantial expansion after transitioning its focus to AI, with numerous startups raising more than $12 billion in funding in the first quarter of 2023, triggered by the success of ChatGPT and the ensuing market frenzy.
CoreWeave provides computing power to AI companies, positioning itself as a competitor to major cloud computing service providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon s AWS.
CoreWeave also adopts a unique approach in constructing its data centers specifically for AI work to set itself apart from all other AI data centers, McBee said. CoreWeave is a networking technology called InfiniBand that interfaces computers, which is similar to Ethernet cables in most data centers. Core Weave's cutting-edge infrastructure aims to improve performance and improve AI processing capabilities, making it a top contender in the market.