CoreWeave, a company that has quickly become synonymous with the AI infrastructure boom, is making waves again—this time not just by selling the shovels, but by investing in the miners themselves. On September 9, 2025, CoreWeave announced the launch of CoreWeave Ventures, a new venture capital arm designed to bankroll AI startups with both hard cash and something even more coveted in today’s tech landscape: access to scarce, high-performance computing power.
The market’s response was swift and decisive. According to Bloomberg, CoreWeave’s stock jumped nearly 9% in morning trading after the news broke, a rare and welcome surge for a stock that’s been riding a rollercoaster since its IPO in March. The stock closed the day up 4.67%, with shares trading between $97.05 and $103.89, as reported by Cryptopolitan. Year-to-date, the company’s stock has soared by 144.8%, more than doubling from its $40 IPO price. Yet, volatility has been the name of the game, with the company’s share price swinging dramatically on the back of both hype and investor anxiety.
So what’s behind the excitement? CoreWeave Ventures is no ordinary fund. Overseen by co-founder and Chief Development Officer Brannin McBee, and seeded directly from the company’s own balance sheet, the fund offers a unique pitch to early-stage AI companies: not just capital, but priority access to the kind of Nvidia hardware that’s booked out for years. In exchange, CoreWeave takes an equity stake in these startups, giving it a front-row seat to the next generation of AI technologies—and, potentially, a future roster of loyal customers for its own infrastructure services.
McBee explained the rationale to The Wall Street Journal: “It’s an interesting bidirectional pipeline opportunity for us.” The company isn’t just looking to write checks and sit back; it’s actively building a pipeline of startups whose success could directly feed demand for CoreWeave’s own GPU-powered cloud services. The investments are substantial, too—McBee told the Journal that checks could range from seven to nine figures. Already, CoreWeave Ventures has backed nine startups, including Toronto-based Moonvalley, a developer of AI video tools that takes pride in using only licensed content to train its models.
The fund’s first major acquisition underscores its ambitions. Last week, CoreWeave announced it would acquire OpenPipe, a niche startup specializing in reinforcement-learning tools for AI agents. This move signals that the venture arm isn’t just about passive investment—it’s a mechanism to pull the most promising projects directly into CoreWeave’s orbit, deepening the company’s technical alignment with its portfolio companies.
Moonvalley’s co-founder and CEO, Naeem Talukdar, was quick to praise the partnership. “Working with CoreWeave has given us the freedom to think bigger and move faster,” Talukdar told General Catalyst, which led an $84 million round for Moonvalley in July 2025. “They understand the challenges of scaling breakthrough technologies and have backed us with the kind of support that lets us focus on innovation. We’re grateful to have a partner that invests in both our company and the future we’re trying to create.”
CoreWeave’s approach reflects a broader trend in the tech industry, where rapidly growing infrastructure companies are increasingly becoming investors themselves. As Quartz points out, this marks a shift from the traditional model of relying solely on venture capital firms. Instead, companies like CoreWeave are using their own balance sheets to invest in the broader ecosystem, both as a way to generate equity upside and to secure future demand for their services.
The timing of CoreWeave Ventures’ launch is no accident. The company’s second-quarter numbers were nothing short of eye-popping: $1.21 billion in revenue, up more than 200% from a year earlier, and a backlog swelling to $30 billion thanks to contracts with OpenAI and a major hyperscaler, according to Bloomberg. Yet, the growth hasn’t come cheap. CoreWeave posted a GAAP net loss of nearly $300 million in Q2 2025, driven by heavy interest costs and billions in capacity spending. High expenses and tight margins have led some analysts to warn about the risks tied to the company’s capital needs, customer concentration, and high borrowings.
Still, the company’s management remains undeterred. “We started CoreWeave with the conviction that AI’s true promise required a cloud platform built from the ground up to optimize for AI-specific workloads,” McBee said in a press release. “Our aim with CoreWeave Ventures is to give other audacious, like-minded founders the support they need to drive technical advancements and bring to market the next class of innovation.”
CoreWeave Ventures offers multiple investment structures, including direct capital and compute-for-equity arrangements. Portfolio companies gain accelerated access to CoreWeave’s cloud platform and testing environments on production-grade performance clusters. The company also shares product development and go-to-market insights from its work with hundreds of enterprises and AI organizations. The fund supports companies ranging from foundational model developers to vertical AI application builders, with early partners like Moonvalley already reaping the benefits.
But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. After the IPO lock-up expired in August 2025, insiders and early backers sold over $1 billion worth of shares, with director Jack Cogen offloading nearly $300 million, according to Cryptopolitan. The company is also facing scrutiny over its proposed $9 billion all-stock acquisition of Core Scientific, following investor pushback. Some analysts have questioned whether the model can scale sustainably, given the massive spending required to keep up with demand for AI infrastructure.
CoreWeave’s own journey has been marked by rapid pivots and bold bets. Founded in 2017 as a cryptocurrency miner, the company made a decisive shift to cloud infrastructure after the 2018 crypto crash. Its early investment in Nvidia chips positioned it perfectly for the generative AI boom that followed the launch of ChatGPT. By 2023, CoreWeave had joined the big leagues, raising a $221 million Series B round led by Magnetar Capital, which quickly grew to $441 million. In 2024, it raised a $1.1 billion Series C led by Coatue and secured over $10 billion in debt financing, including a $2.3 billion facility from Magnetar and Blackstone Tactical Opportunities. The March 2025 NASDAQ IPO brought in another $1.5 billion.
For Wall Street, the appeal of CoreWeave Ventures is clear. Every bet CoreWeave makes has the potential to come back as both equity upside and a paying customer locked into its infrastructure. In a world where GPU clouds are increasingly interchangeable, building this kind of pipeline is a powerful moat. If even a fraction of its portfolio companies grow into major players, CoreWeave stands to get paid twice—once as an investor, and again as the indispensable landlord of their infrastructure.
While the headaches of building power-hungry data centers and managing massive spending won’t disappear overnight, CoreWeave Ventures gives the company a way to script its own demand curve. It’s a perpetual motion machine that, if successful, could keep CoreWeave at the center of the AI infrastructure universe for years to come.
