CEO Mike Intrator acknowledged Friday that the company’s IPO pricing, which fell below initial expectations, must be viewed within the broader macroeconomic landscape.
“There are significant macro headwinds,” Intrator said on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “We had to scale or rightsize the transaction to align with where the buying interest was.”
CoreWeave, which provides access to Nvidia GPUs for AI training and workloads, priced its IPO at $40 per share—below the initial $47 to $55 per share range. The stock will debut on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “CRWV.”
According to sources familiar with the offering, the lower price created a sufficient discount to the company’s replacement value, helping investors feel more comfortable entering the market, CNBC’s Leslie Picker reported.
Approximately 10-15 long-term and strategic investors comprised the majority of CoreWeave’s backers, sources said.
“We believe that as the public markets become more familiar with us—our execution, infrastructure development, client relationships, and the immense capabilities of our solutions—CoreWeave will achieve great success,” CEO Mike Intrator stated.
Nvidia is supporting the offering with a $250 million order, CNBC reported Thursday.
At $40 per share, CoreWeave raised $1.5 billion, bringing its non-diluted valuation to approximately $19 billion.
Intrator stated that the company plans to use the funds for debt repayment and expansion.
At the end of 2024, CoreWeave carried nearly $8 billion in debt.
The company has also been driven by recent market momentum sparked by DeepSeek, which pushed CoreWeave to “build bigger” and “build faster,” Intrator said.
“One of the key factors behind our effectiveness is our long-term perspective on where this industry is heading,” he noted.
“Our customers are consistently telling us to keep building—we’re struggling to keep up with demand at this scale.”
Intrator also addressed past administrative challenges, including technical defaults on a loan last year.
CoreWeave began utilizing funds from its $7.6 billion loan to scale operations in Europe, according to The Financial Times.
CEO Mike Intrator acknowledged a previous administrative misstep, which the company self-reported in its S-1 filing and promptly resolved with lenders.
“These lenders went on to extend us hundreds of millions of dollars even after these issues were addressed,” Intrator said.
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