Willy Lee, a principal at Neostellar Capital, a publicly traded venture capital firm that owns a stake in CoreWeave worth approximately $10 million, said that many investors are anxiously awaiting Anthropic's expected IPO in November before they commit significant capital to smaller AI companies.
But Lee believes that CoreWeave has been consistently misunderstood by investors since it went public last year. Its debt issuance is backed by contracts with large, investment-grade companies that lease the chips in its data centers, and doesn't rely on any one customer to drive demand.
"There's so much riding on the Anthropic IPO and everyone is trying to get a pulse on what the pricing looks like, and then price against that," Lee said. "People are conflating their feelings about Anthopic and its ability to pay for its compute with the core business of what CoreWeave currently is, which is a huge company with nearly $130 billion of backlog, most of it from investment-grade companies."