CoreWeave Shares Gain 4.5% After Launch of VC Arm Targeting AI Startups

Shares of CoreWeave (CRWV) rose as much as 9% on Monday morning after the company announced it’s launching a venture capital arm focused on early-stage artificial intelligence ￰0￱ stock was higher by 4.5% as midday ￰1￱ approached.. The new fund, called CoreWeave Ventures, will focus on investing in startups building tools, infrastructure or applications for ￰2￱ company didn’t disclose how much capital would be committed but framed the effort as an extension of its broader mission to support high-performance computing for machine learning and generative AI. “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,” said Brannin McBee, co-founder and chief development officer at ￰3￱ specializes in cloud computing optimized for AI workloads, offering access to Nvidia GPUs and fast storage to clients ranging from large enterprises to research ￰4￱ went public earlier this year at $40 per share and surged to a high of $187 in June before pulling ￰5￱ launch of CoreWeave Ventures comes during a busy period for cloud infrastructure firms focused on ￰6￱ Monday, Nebius, another player in the “neocloud” space, signed a five-year, $19.4 billion agreement with Microsoft to supply computing ￰7￱ announcement sent several AI and data center stocks higher, adding momentum to the ￰8￱ is also in the process of acquiring bitcoin miner Core Scientific (CORZ) in a $9 billion all-stock ￰9￱ merger, announced in July, is still subject to shareholder and regulatory ￰10￱ AI startups, the arrival of another specialized investor could offer an alternative to generalist VC firms or hyperscaler-linked ￰11￱ for CoreWeave, it’s a chance to bet on the ecosystem it helps power — and maybe get early access to the next breakthrough.