IPO-bound CoreWeave to buy AI developer Weights & Biases for a reported $1.4B – News

Cloud-based artificial intelligence infrastructure startup CoreWeave Inc. today announced it plans to buy the AI model development firm Weights & Biases Inc. for an undisclosed price.

The company confirmed the acquisition plan just minutes after The Information first reported that it was “in talks” to buy Weights & Biases in a deal valued at $1.7 billion.

CoreWeave has emerged as one of the AI industry’s hottest properties because it provides enterprises with access to that most treasured resource: the graphics processing units that power today’s AI services. Through its cloud infrastructure, enterprise customers such as Meta Platforms Inc. can obtain on-demand access to some of Nvidia’s most powerful GPUs, including its H100 and H200 chips, which are designed to provide accelerated computing power for large language models and other AI workloads.

San Francisco-based Weights & Biases, which had raised more than $250 million in funding from investors since its founding in 2017, has built a platform that promises to speed up the development of AI models. It provides extensive capabilities to AI developers, including tools for managing training datasets, testing how changes to a model affect its performance, and troubleshooting technical problems.

In addition, Weights & Biases offers more specialized capabilities, including a set of features for fixing so-called “hallucinations,” or erroneous responses that are sometimes generated by large language models. Its platform has proved to be a major hit, and the company claims it’s being used by more than 1 million AI engineers, including some from enterprises such as OpenAI, Meta, Nvidia Corp., Snowflake Inc. and Toyota Motor Co.

CoreWeave said it will integrate Weights & Biases’ capabilities into its cloud infrastructure platform in order to give customers a more comprehensive “end-to-end” AI experience. Not only will they be able to run their models in its cloud, they’ll also be able to build and test their own. Collectively, the two companies aim to help customers accelerate their AI roadmaps and bring new applications to market faster.

It promised that Weights & Biases’ existing customers will continue to be allowed to deploy their AI models wherever they like, meaning they won’t be forced onto its cloud infrastructure – though they’ll likely be “encouraged” to consider it.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told News that CoreWeave’s management has recognized that many enterprises prefer to buy a complete AI solution that can simplify their forays into AI application and model development, housing everything under one roof.

“They want a turnkey cloud platform that lets them build and operate their next-generation AI applications and do everything associated with them in one place, and that’s what CoreWeave aims to give them,” he said.

CoreWeave co-founder and Chief Executive Michael Intrator described Weights & Biases as a “phenomenal platform” that helps companies of any size to get a handle on the complexities of building AI models, deploying them and monitoring their performance.

“Together with CoreWeave, we will bring this grit and passion for innovation to customers at an even greater scale, with the goal of rapidly accelerating adoption across the world’s leading AI labs and enterprises,” promised Weights & Biases CEO Lukas Biewald.

The acquisition is subject to “customary closing conditions” and is expected to be finalized in the first half of the year. Assuming it does go ahead as planned, it will bring an even greater sense of urgency to CoreWeave’s plan to list on the Nasdaq stock exchange later this year.

Only yesterday, the company revealed it had filed the necessary paperwork for its initial public offering, saying it intends to trade on the Nasdaq exchange under the “CRWV” ticker symbol.

CoreWeave’s IPO filing revealed that the company has seen dramatic growth over the last year, with its revenue rising by a stunning 700%, to $1.92 billion, in fiscal 2024. It’s expecting to grow even faster in the future, too, with more than $15 billion in signed contracts that it has yet to fulfill. The company remains unprofitable, though, posting a loss of $863.4 million that year.

Image: CoreWeave