Cerebras IPO mints two billionaires, sets stage for potential AI wave

The tech billionaires club has two new members after Cerebras’ blockbuster IPO lifted the chipmaker’s market cap close to $100 billion.

Roughly a decade after starting Cerebras, Andrew Feldman, the company’s CEO, and technology chief Sean Lie, own stakes worth $3.2 billion and $1.7 billion, respectively.

Cerebras shares soared 68% in their Nasdaq debut on Thursday, capping a remarkable rise for a company that withdrew its prior IPO filing seven months ago, opting instead to raise private capital. In February, Cerebras was valued at $23.1 billion by investors, and now the company is riding a fresh wave of demand for AI chips that’s sent shares of Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Micron soaring.

Feldman told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the company reached a level of maturity where it “made sense to access the public markets.”

“We have tremendous opportunities for growth, and this was the right way to fund our growth,” Feldman said, after his company raised $5.55 billion in the largest IPO of the year.

The day one pop also means a big markup for Cerebras’ early investors and a much-needed win for Silicon Valley venture capitalists during what’s been an extended dry spell for IPOs.

Benchmark, which co-led Cerebras’ Series A funding round in 2016, is sitting on shares worth $5.5 billion at Thursday’s close. Foundation Capital, another key investor in that round, owns a stake valued at $4.8 billion.

While total U.S. venture-backed exit value more than doubled last year to $217.1 billion, that number is less than one-third the peak in 2021, when exits reached $790.7 billion, according to the National Venture Capital Association’s annual yearbook.

“It’s a big outcome,” said Eric Vishria, the Benchmark partner who led his firm’s Cerebras investment and still sits on the board. “Whether it’s $100 billion or $50 billion, or any of these, it’s very rare to have companies go public period when you’re an early-stage venture investor. It’s very rare to have any company go public at any valuation.”

Before Cerebras, Feldman co-founded and was the CEO of SeaMicro, a microserver maker that AMD acquired in 2012 for about $334 million. Feldman’s Cerebras stake of almost 10.3 million shares represents about 5.5% of the company, while Lie owns nearly 3%.

Cerebras’ IPO was large by just about any measure. But not when compared to what could be coming, with SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, which are all at or near trillion-dollar valuations on the private market. The companies are all benefiting from the AI boom and soaring demand for AI models and services and the systems that underpin them.

OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are seeing handsome returns even before their company goes public. They were among a group of early investors in Cerebras, as was Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan. Altman’s shares are now worth $27.8 million, and Brockman’s stake is valued at $24.2 million.

OpenAI has been tightening its bond with Cerebras, striking a $20 billion multi-year deal in early 2026 for computing capacity and related services. While Cerebras sells infrastructure for many layers of the AI stack, including data centers, their own chips and a cloud platform, the chipmaker’s specialty is in inference, where models are responding and interacting directly with users.

The firm claims its Wafer Scale Engine 3 chips run faster than Nvidia’s GPUs.

“It’s been a long, very interesting road, lots of technology and innovation and many white-knuckle moments,” said Steve Vassallo, a partner at Foundation Capital and a Cerebras director. “Today is yet another example of that.”

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

WATCH: Cerebras ends first day of trading nearly 70% above IPO price