CoreWeave, a New York City-based startup that originally began as an Ethereum mining venture, has successfully secured a substantial amount of funding as it continues to shift towards becoming a versatile cloud-computing platform. Recently, CoreWeave declared that it had raised $221 million in a Series B funding round. The financing was headed by Magnetar Capital, with the participation of notable companies such as Nvidia, ex-GitHub CEO, Nat Friedman, and former Apple executive, Daniel Gross.
The investment has been earmarked to further CoreWeave’s US-based data center expansion, which will include the opening of two new centers this year. The total amount raised now stands at $371 million, with CoreWeave currently operating five centers in North America.
The company was founded by CEO Mike Intrator, Brian Venturo and Brannin McBee in 2017 to fill an evident gap in the cloud market. Venturo, an amateur Ethereum miner, procured GPUs inexpensively from insolvent cryptocurrency mining farms and favored Nvidia hardware for its enhanced memory capacity, which may have prompted Nvidia’s interest in CoreWeave. At first, CoreWeave exclusively focused on cryptocurrency applications but shifted its focus in recent years to include general-purpose computing as well as generative AI technologies, such as text-generating AI models.