Latest news with #BranninMcBee
Time of India
14-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Moonvalley raises $84 million to bolster AI video tools
Academy Empower your mind, elevate your skills Artificial intelligence research company Moonvalley has raised $84 million more in a funding round led by existing investor General Catalyst, it said on Monday, a week after releasing its first video AI heavyweights including OpenAI and Alphabet are looking to get a leg-up in the lucrative entertainment industry, as film studios seek to use generative AI to speed up content creation and cut video and image generation tools have also led to lawsuits by major film studios against AI companies, accusing them of copyright infringement and said the investment will help it meet enterprise demand, expand content library and build features that partners have requested. CoreWeave , Khosla Ventures and YCombinator also invested in the last week released its first licensed AI video model for professional month, visual effects veteran Ed Ulbrich, who worked on films such as "Titanic" and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," joined Moonvalley as head of strategic growth and company had raised $70 million in November last year, bringing the total funding to $154 million."Our relationship provides Moonvalley with access to advanced compute resources - including the latest GPU systems," Brannin McBee, cofounder and chief development officer for CoreWeave, said.
Yahoo
14-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Moonvalley raises $84 million to bolster AI video tools
(Reuters) -Artificial intelligence research company Moonvalley has raised $84 million more in a funding round led by existing investor General Catalyst, it said on Monday, a week after releasing its first video AI model. WHY IT'S IMPORTANT Tech heavyweights including OpenAI and Alphabet are looking to get a leg-up in the lucrative entertainment industry, as film studios seek to use generative AI to speed up content creation and cut costs. But video and image generation tools have also led to lawsuits by major film studios against AI companies, accusing them of copyright infringement and plagiarism. Moonvalley said the investment will help it meet enterprise demand, expand content library and build features that partners have requested. CoreWeave, Khosla Ventures and YCombinator also invested in the round. CONTEXT Moonvalley last week released its first licensed AI video model for professional production. Last month, visual effects veteran Ed Ulbrich, who worked on films such as "Titanic" and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," joined Moonvalley as head of strategic growth and partnerships. The company had raised $70 million in November last year, bringing the total funding to $154 million. KEY QUOTE "Our relationship provides Moonvalley with access to advanced compute resources – including the latest GPU systems," Brannin McBee, co-founder and chief development officer for CoreWeave, said. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
CoreWeave stock rips higher after muted IPO
CoreWeave's stock (CRWV) is enjoying a rip-your-face-off rally since debuting to a muted reception on the Nasdaq less than a week ago. Shares of the AI cloud play spiked 41% on Tuesday and popped 11% to $58.60 in early Wednesday trading. "In the first few days of trading, I would expect it to be added to various AI baskets which are very prominent right now," D.A. Davidson software analyst Gil Luria told me on what's driving the robust market action this week. CoreWeave priced its initial public offering (IPO) at $40 a share in March. The company initially expected to sell shares in the range of $47 to $55, but concerns about the pace of AI spending and CoreWeave's business model caused it to downsize the offering. Nvidia (NVDA) — an early CoreWeave investor — reportedly anchored the IPO at $40. The company raised $1.5 billion for a valuation of $23 billion on a fully diluted basis. It had planned to raise $4 billion at a valuation of $35 billion. The stock opened around $40 per share on March 28, fell as much as 6%, then turned green and rose by as much as 4%. Shares were flat to conclude their first day of trading. When asked whether customers are getting worried about the pace of investment in artificial intelligence, CoreWeave co-founder Brannin McBee told me, "Not that we see," on the company's IPO day (video above). "And this discussion of an AI bubble — we don't understand it." CoreWeave was founded in 2017 as a crypto miner by Michael Intrator, Brian Venturo, and McBee, who largely have backgrounds in the energy industry. The company took a $100 million investment and $320 million contract from Nvidia (NVDA) as well as a multiyear deal with Microsoft (MSFT) to raise $1.6 billion in equity and $12.9 billion in debt commitments. This allowed CoreWeave to purchase 250,000 GPUs from Nvidia, or about $10 billion worth. Today, the company provides access to data centers and high-powered chips for AI workloads. It competes with cloud providers like Microsoft and Amazon (AMZN). Financial results have been solid for an early-stage tech player. Sales last year rose to $1.9 billion from $228 million in 2023. Adjusted operating profits increased to $1.2 billion from $103 million in 2023. But CoreWeave is not without a few risks staring down investors. Concerns linger about CoreWeave using large amounts of debt to fund purchases of a depreciating asset in AI chips. The company has raised $14.9 billion in debt and equity across 12 financings to buy chips and build data centers. It spent $941 million to service its debt in 2024, according to the company's S-1 filing. In addition, OpenAI has committed $11.9 billion in orders to CoreWeave. If the large language model builder can't raise enough money to support its growth ambitions, CoreWeave could see order cancellations. Currently, Microsoft accounts for 62% of CoreWeave's sales. Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
30-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The CEO of CoreWeave explains why they went public—And why they scaled back their initial offer
Shares of CoreWeave, an AI cloud provider, started trading Friday following a much-anticipated IPO that is being seen as a litmus test for other AI companies hoping to go public. Originally founded as a crypto mining company, CoreWeave pivoted to renting out its Nvidia graphic processing units to companies desperate to train AI. The New Jersey-based company is the first tech listing this year, but its debut does not come without controversy. While revenue is up more than 700% year over year, only two customers account for 77% of that figure, and the company has warned of 'material weaknesses,' including its capacity for internal financial reporting. The company's shares opened at $39, and reached $41.79 earlier today after being priced at $40 in the IPO. The company—founded by Michael Intrator, Brannin McBee, and Brian Venturo—now has a market cap of around $19.44 billion. The stock closed at just under $40. I sat down with Intrator, the company's CEO, to hear more about what differentiates their business, and why they decided to go public. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity To be an AI company based in New Jersey is like being East Coast rap. Michael Intrator: Funny, because that's sort of how we feel. So how are you feeling about the IPO? I am unbelievably excited about what we've accomplished and it's just so incredible for the company. It's incredible for our ability to continue to execute and scale our business. I'm really, really excited about where we are. What differentiates you in the market? There are three things that we do as a company. The first piece is that we built a beautiful technical solution to how to run parallelized computing in the cloud. It's a software solution that is specifically specialized to make the compute performant available, scalable, flexible, all the things that you need to build and train and serve artificial intelligence use cases. When the hyperscalers built a function for CPU computing, they built a minivan—a configuration of compute that was really good at everything, but not great at anything, and that was exactly what you needed to build a cloud for [a] CPU-based computer, sequential based. What we did is we stepped back and said, 'How do you architect a beautiful technical solution to this new problem associated with how you run cloud computing for parallelized workloads?' We have a better software solution to optimize the infrastructure. The second one is, you need to understand the power markets, the data, to ultimately make the compute available and useful for your clients. And we're able to do that at massive scale. And the third area of the business is that we need to be able to use the financial markets to access the size and scale of capital that allows you to build at a scale that lets you be relevant in this revolution. What made you decide to tap the capital markets right now? Going public was a means to an end for us. We are focused on the debt markets, because the debt markets are how we will finance and build the business and scale it. By becoming public, by continuing to scale the business, we will be able to more effectively tap the debt markets, which will drive down the cost structure associated with building at this magnitude. And so ultimately, the company will become a rated entity, and we'll be able to borrow at a much tighter spread to the other folks that we're competing with in the market. The objective was to get to the market, to build a syndicate of buyers that are very sticky and believe in the mission that we are building, that are going to be long-term shareholders that will give us an opportunity to drive value over the next 20 years. You scaled back the size of the offer. When you take into account the broader market headwinds, the AI headwinds around that specific trade, it just made sense to shrink the size of the offering and to adjust the price to account for the current risk profile on the market. And ultimately, today is the best day to go public, because it puts us on the path towards what we need to accomplish as a business. Yeah, so, a little bigger, a little smaller, a little higher, a little lower. That's not going to matter. What's going to matter is, how do we execute on our business? How do we scale our business? How do we build our client base? How do we diversify our clients, all of those things that are just so important and so much easier when you are a public company than a private company. What's your reaction to the media coverage around the IPO? You're not too concentrated on one client? Well, they say that we had 60% of revenue from Microsoft, and then we signed a contract with OpenAI for just under $12 billion and now we're less than 50%. All the big players that need this type of infrastructure, that understand the quality of the infrastructure we deliver and the skill and performance that they will be able to achieve with it, those are our customers. And then we'll have other customers like JPMorgan and IBM and, you know, Jane Street Training that use the infrastructure in a different way to solve for a very specific problem. They will be wonderful clients too, but they're not going to be building a three gigawatt facility. There's just not that many people that need that. So there will be concentration when you win one of those mind-bendingly large deals, and you're going to win a lot of other deals in the enterprise space that are really, really interesting. So what is the market getting wrong? I think that the market needs to understand over time that there will be concentration for everyone that's serving us. Alibaba's chairman said that he thinks there could be a data center bubble. And DeepSeek planted the idea we may not need all this compute. I think there's a divergence between what the capital markets and what the media is thinking, and what I am feeling down in the trenches. What I am feeling—and then I'll tell you what I think the media saying—is relentless demand. We need more compute. We need larger compute. We have many, many clients in line to get into our infrastructure, and we are throttled by our ability to bring it up online as we build up the data center and infrastructure to deliver it. I think that's true for a lot of other really important clients out there, like Meta. Have you become too emblematic of broader trends? Do you feel that too much is being thrust on you in terms of what this IPO represents, what you represent? I really don't think about it that way. I think about it as this idea is important for our company to continue to execute on our strategy, and one of the things that we do really well is execute, so I don't get too distracted by the noise. I know what my clients want. I know the type of infrastructure they need. I know the type of scale that they're requesting, and I build for them and we are client-led. What's your message for those who wonder about your boldness in coming to market now? I think that the boldness of coming to this market amid the turmoil is because of a fundamental belief that, over time, I will be able to generate enormous value for my investors. I don't really care where it is today or tomorrow or the day after, but I believe fundamentally, the business model that we have, the software solutions that we have, the capacity to build and deliver this and the demand we see in front of us will lead to enormous value to our clients over time. Given your history with crypto mining, any thoughts on that? Yeah, I don't. I don't spend too much time on that. My business is really focused on this, and I got my hands full, as I'm sure you can imagine. The stock opened $1 below the IPO price. Do you feel like there's some fatigue setting in? I think there's a lot of people who are talking their book and causing an echo chamber. Look at the end of the day, the overriding lens that I use here is that in entering the public markets, I have prepared this company to be able to continue to build and execute, and when you can do that, you can drive enormous shareholder value to your investors. That's what we're going to do every day. This story was originally featured on Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
CoreWeave stock seesaws, ends flat after IPO in AI trade test
The AI cloud computing provider CoreWeave made its debut on the Nasdaq Friday under the ticker CRWV. The stock opened around $40 per share at 1:15 PM ET, fell as much as 6%, turned green and rose by as much as 4%, and eventually ended the session flat. The company, which provides computing power using its mass supply of Nvidia (NVDA) GPUs to Big Tech, raised $1.5 billion in its IPO — much lower than the $4 billion it had initially hoped to raise. CoreWeave's IPO and public debut are the first real test of the AI trade, critics say. That's because the Nvidia-backed company's fate relies in large part on the sustained success of generative artificial intelligence, which CoreWeave itself said in its amended S-1 filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission is an unknown. 'The broader adoption, use, and commercialization of AI technology, and the continued rapid pace of developments in the AI field, are inherently uncertain," the company said in its filing when describing its risk factors. CoreWeave's revenue soared to $1.9 billion in 2024 from just $229 million the prior year, the filing showed. At the same time, however, its net loss rose to $863 million from $594 million. And some 77% of CoreWeave's 2024 revenue came from just two customers, with 62% coming from Microsoft (MSFT), according to the filing. Those customers who offer cloud services, known as "hyperscalers," use CoreWeave's GPU-filled data centers to power their AI efforts. 'Any negative changes in demand from Microsoft … would adversely affect our business, operating results, financial condition, and future prospects,' CoreWeave wrote. Microsoft stock dropped more than 3% after CoreWeave shares began trading. Nvidia fell 1.7%. The company remains optimistic. "This discussion of [an] AI bubble, we don't understand it," CoreWeave co-founder and chief development officer Brannin McBee told Yahoo Finance's Brian Sozzi. "Clients come into us, and they are saying, 'CoreWeave, we recognize you're the best at delivering this infrastructure in the in the space. We need more, and we need a lot more.' And that scale of growth is just continuing to accelerate for us," he said. "That's why we're going public, is to support our clients in their growth requirements for infrastructure that we bring to market for them." "We are the critical piece to connecting the artificial intelligence products that the world's thought leaders are bringing to market to the consumers of those products," he continued. CoreWeave faces $7.5 billion in debt repayments by the end of next year, the Financial Times reported. "CoreWeave simply doesn't have meaningful demand or revenue resulting from its services," Big Tech critic and podcaster Ed Zitron wrote in a recent newsletter. Laura Bratton is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Bluesky @ Email her at Sign in to access your portfolio
