Case Study: Coreweave Prices IPO at $40 — What Employees and Investors Stand to Gain

2025 IPO season is underway with Coreweave debuting on public markets today (Friday 3/28/25), marking the first big AI IPO.

Coreweave went from being relatively unknown a couple years ago, to one of the hottest IPO names this year. The company began as a cryptocurrency mining operation, leveraging GPUs for raw compute power. It later pivoted into a specialized cloud infrastructure provider, offering high-performance GPU-based solutions for compute-intensive workloads like AI and machine learning. Now, they are a major player in providing the infrastructure that is needed for the boom in AI development.

It’s only day one of Coreweave’s IPO, but let’s take a look at how investors and employees are faring so far. Please note that we will be using the opening day IPO price of $40 for this analysis. Most employees/investors will have a 6-month lockup period, so their actual returns may vary depending on how the market views the company.

Below is a graph of Coreweave’s preferred and common stock pricing from Seed in 2019 to their IPO in 2025.

Preferred Stock: How did the Investors do?

Series Seed (800x), Series A (343x), and Series B-1 (100x) investors all did amazing. All these returns are incredible and still took under 7 years to achieve. These investors hit the jackpot and invested when there was a high amount of risk, but were paid handsomely for it. Granted the company they invested in is vastly different from the company we see today.

Series B. Another stellar return. This investment took under 3 years to materialize, and they are still returning a 7.17x. That’s beating the S&P over that time by a whopping 422%.

Lastly, the Series C (1.03x) investors are barely breaking even here. Although they made a relatively safe investment having done this less than a year ago, the return is leaving something to be desired. They will be hope for the stock to perform well in the public markets.

Common Stock: How did the Employees do?

Employees time! Below is a table of employees’ strike prices (the price employees pay to exercise their options) at certain dates according to the S1. We guessed how many employees (Emp #) received each strike price based on data from LinkedIn. This also includes the cost to exercise 1,000 shares, and what those shares are worth today. All exercise costs assume $0 in taxes, which is unfortunately rarely the case, but this allows us to compare these gross amounts apples to apples - as if they are being exercised and sold today. Typically, there will be either short or long-term capital gains associated with the sale (on top of AMT or income tax at the time of exercise).

Employees, like the investors, did amazing at almost every level. The employees who started in 2022 and before are all sitting on at least 37x their exercise cost in today's value. Another block of around 100 employees are currently holding a 14.29x and even after that there are about 175 employees looking at a 2.58x in less than 2 years despite joining after the Series C.

The company did a tender offer in Oct 2024 at $46.99. We’re unsure if this became the new employees strike price, if it did, those would currently be underwater.

The interesting part about this tender is that employees had the chance to sell some of their shares at a price that is 17% higher than the IPO price. We’ll see if this holds out as a high point after the lockup, but it is compelling that even in a hot IPO the pre-IPO sellers may have been better off than those who patiently waited for the public offering.

Key Takeaways:

1. This growth is seemingly unprecedented: Coreweave went from $15M in revenue to $1.9B from 2022 to 2024. Much of this seems like the company being in the right place at the right time, but there’s no doubt they’ve executed well to scale their revenue in this way. Not sure the next time we’ll see a company grow at these levels again anytime soon.
2. Startup upside is tough to beat: This is definitely an outlier event on the high end of returns, but still a great display of the huge potential offered by startup equity. Many employees, having only worked for the company for a couple of years, will be making returns that all investors dream of. Yes, the risks are high, and startups more often than not don’t make it, but in this case, there will be many millionaires made from this IPO. Note: most IPOs take longer and deliver less value, but this provides a high upside example to dream on.
3. Lockup might be bumpy: A week ago Coreweave was considering an IPO price as high as $55 and it ended up going out at $40. Much of this is almost certainly due to the current uncertainty within the markets, but it will be interesting how public investors treat this for the next six months.

All in all, Coreweave’s IPO has delivered outstanding outcomes for early investors and employees. The company’s explosive growth and well-timed position in the AI infrastructure boom led to life-changing returns for those who got in early, while later-stage investors are seeing more modest gains—at least for now. With market volatility still in play and a six-month lockup ahead, it remains to be seen how public markets will value the company once shares become eligible for sale.

We’ll check back in after the lockup expires to see how the dust settles.

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