In just 3 months, CoreWeave CEO, once a crypto-mining bro, becomes a deca-billionaire

CoreWeave co-founder and CEO Michael Intrator’s net worth has skyrocketed to about $10 billion in the three months since the AI firm went public, Bloomberg reports.
His company’s debut was both the biggest tech IPO so far of 2025 – raising $1.5 billion – and also somewhat of a clunker: its founders had reportedly hoped to raise a lot more – up to $4 billion – and had to skinny their ambitions.
CoreWeave still feels a bit like both a success and a house of cards. It offers AI training and inference cloud services built upon a growing stockpile of Nvidia GPUs. One of its investors is Nvidia, which helps it obtain the precious, short-in-supply chips.
CoreWeave has both Microsoft and OpenAI as customers – the latter signed a deal to buy $12 billion worth of services and still has about $11 billion worth to buy. And Nvidia increased its stake after the IPO, the company disclosed.
But CoreWeave borrows money against the GPUs to pay for them – and its IPO wasn’t big enough to get it out of that cycle. It’s got about $8.8 billion worth of debt as of March, it disclosed, with interest rates as high as 15%. Even though it brought in almost $1 billion in revenue in Q1 alone ($985 million), it recorded a net loss of about $315 million.
That has not scared away investors who remain eager for ways to make money on AI. CoreWeave’s stock has soared almost 300% since its March IPO, raising Intrator’s net worth to above $10 billion, Bloomberg calculates.
But the wildest part of Intrator’s history, as well as that of his co-founders Brian Venturo and Brannin McBee, is that the whole thing started out as a make-money-quick, crypto mining enterprise when their previous company, a hedge fund, failed.
The business partners went from a closet full of GPUs to thousands of them in a New Jersey warehouse, to an AI training experiment with an open source LLM group, EleutherAI, Venturo previously told TechCrunch.
Today, the company is servicing the biggest LLM players on the planet, reportedly seeking to buy its competitor Core Scientific, and the founders are billionaires. And, as we previously reported, it’s not all paper money. All three founders pocketed over $150 million apiece by cashing out of shares ahead of the IPO.
CoreWeave remains a symbol of the AI industry in 2025: Massive, fast-growing revenue, investor enthusiasm built on an insatiable need for more resources.
Coreweave declined additional comment.
You Might Also Like
AI startup Friend spent more than $1M on all those subway ads
If you’ve been on the New York City subway recently, you’ve probably seen stark white ads promoting a wearable AI...
Cohere hits $7B valuation a month after its last raise, partners with AMD
On Wednesday, Enterprise AI model-maker Cohere said it raised an additional $100 million — bumping its valuation to $7 billion...
TechCrunch Mobility: The two robotaxi battlegrounds that matter
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for all things “future of transportation.” To get this in your inbox, sign...
US government charges British teenager accused of at least 120 ‘Scattered Spider’ hacks
The U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday unsealed federal charges against British teenager Thalha Jubair, who prosecutors accuse of being...