Cerebras Systems raised $5.5 billion in its IPO on Thursday, pricing shares at $185 Wednesday evening, way higher than its range ($115 to $125, later raised to $150 to $160), even as it increased the size of the offering to 30 million shares.
It then opened to public trading at $385, more than double (up 108%), as retail investors bid up the price to grab shares. The stock cooled a bit soon after, trading midday at above $330. It ended the day at $311 and a $66 billion valuation, according to Yahoo Finance. But the price was rising again in after-hours trading.
Even at the IPO price of $185, the company entered its first day of trading at a fully diluted valuation of $56.4 billion (meaning, accounting for all shares). Co-founder CEO Andrew Feldman’s stake at $185/share was worth nearly $1.9 billion, while co-founder and CTO Sean Lie’s stake weighed in at about $1 billion.
And obviously, if the above $300 price holds, the company and founders are worth far more than that.
A year ago, it looked like this day would never happen for Cerebras. The Nvidia competitor, which designed its giant chip from scratch, purpose-built for AI, had first filed to go public in 2024. But concerns about a large investment from Abu Dhabi-based Group 42 mired the IPO in an endless review from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Investors were also cool about its financials: Group 42 accounted for almost all of Cerebras’ revenue. So those IPO plans were shelved.
IPO ambitions reappeared in earnest in April when the company was able to report about double the revenue: $510 million in 2025 (up 76% year-over-year), and from a handful of customers. It also reported a massive swing to a profit — to $237.8 million in net income — compared to losing nearly half a billion the year before.
Investors began salivating.
Cerebras has now come out as a major contender for supplying chips for inference — the ongoing compute processing required for models to answer prompts — and counts OpenAI (in a complicated circular-deal relationship), G42, Saudi's Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, and Amazon Web Services as customers.
Topics
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Julie Bort
Venture Editor
Julie Bort is the Startups/Venture Desk editor for TechCrunch.You can contact or verify outreach from Julie by emailing julie.bort@techcrunch.com or via @Julie188 on X. View Bio
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