US IPO Weekly Winners & Losers

There isn’t a good time for a market sell-off, but this feels like particularly bad timing.

The IPO Index fell to a 7-month low this week, just as bankers, investors, and issuers were getting ready for the deal calendar’s spring pickup. Wall Street analysts blamed uncertainty around earnings growth and US trade policy. The Fed Chair is keeping rates steady.

And so for the umpteenth time, IPO candidates delayed their planned listings.

Not all of them: AI cloud services provider CoreWeave (Nasdaq: CRWV) filed for an estimated $3+ billion IPO this week. That puts it on track for an IPO the last week of March.

Unlike other hyperscalers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google), CoreWeave’s offering was built for AI workloads, and its data centers run more than 250,000 NVIDIA chips. As tech giants poured billions into AI development, CoreWeave scaled revenue from $16 million to $1.9 billion in just two years. Top customer Microsoft has committed to spend billions more.

CoreWeave is not your typical VC-backed tech startup. For one, it’s rare to see a tech IPO call itself a pioneer in debt financing. Last year, CoreWeave spent almost $9 billion on capex, and less than 1% of that on R&D. It was founded by energy traders, and the top investor is a hedge fund.

If CoreWeave buys NVIDIA GPUs and pays third parties to build out its data centers... what’s their secret sauce?

Hard to say. The company highlights its network architecture, but don’t underestimate the power of being in the right place at the right time. At the very least, CoreWeave can point to the fact that it's standing on top of a geyser of cash.

A day after the filing, CoreWeave bolstered its tech stack by acquiring AI developer platform Weights & Biases for a rumored $1.7 billion.

There are no major deals on the IPO calendar, but another billion-dollar IPO may soon join the pipeline. Fintech Klarna is expected to file its long-awaited S-1 next week.

This past week’s sole sizable IPO, medical device maker Kestra Medical Technologies (Nasdaq: KMTS) priced above-range and opened with a +35% gain, settling to +23% by Friday’s close. In a market like this, don’t feel rushed to buy the first trade.

The IPO market shed -6.7% this week, with the S&P 500 off -3.1%. Chinese EV maker Zeekr led the winners with a weekly gain of +16.8%. The bottom-performers included some of the hottest AI plays over the past six months, such as Credo (-20.8%) and Reddit (-17.2%).