Cerebras Systems didn’t just go public this week; It has successfully minted billionaires and made one of the largest venture payouts in years. The artificial intelligence chip startup priced its initial public offering at $185 per share on Wednesday (May 13), above the range it has already raised twice. Shares opened at $350 on Thursday and closed at $311.07, valuing the company at about $95 billion. The $5.55 billion offering is the largest U.S. tech IPO since Uber in 2019 and the largest semiconductor debut ever, and serves as an early test of investor appetite for a wave of AI listings, including OpenAI and Anthropic later this year.
Momentum slowed a bit today, with shares down about 5 percent on the day to around $293. However, the IPO immediately created billionaires and generated massive returns for a narrow circle of early backers.
CEO Andrew Feldman, 56, co-founded Cerebras in 2016 with four former colleagues from SeaMicro, a server company he founded and sold to AMD for $334 million. Feldman owns approximately 5.5% of Cerebras, which is now a stake Its value is about $3.2 billion According to Bloomberg. Co-founder and CTO Sean Lie has a stake worth about $1.6 billion.
Feldman is a serial entrepreneur with deep roots in Silicon Valley. He grew up on the campus of Stanford University, where his parents were professors, and later earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration from the university. Over the past two decades, he helped take Riverstone Networks public and led marketing at Force10 Networks before its $800 million sale to Dell. Cerebras is his fourth semiconductor and data infrastructure company and his biggest win ever.
Earlier this year, the company’s board approved what it described as an “ambitious” compensation package for Feldman, awarding additional shares tied to market capitalization milestones. The timing underscores Cerebras’ rapid rise: the company It reported revenue of $510 million For 2025, up 76 percent year over year, and turning to $238 million in net income after a loss of $481 million in 2024.
The biggest winners from the IPO also include investment firms that have backed Cerebras from the beginning.
Benchmark, Foundation Capital and Eclipse Ventures co-led the company’s $27 million Series A in 2016. At Benchmark, Eric Vicheria led the deal and remains a member of the board. The company’s 8.1 percent stake was worth about $6 billion at Thursday’s close. Benchmark’s conviction in the company remained strong even late in the game. In February, it raised two new funds, called Benchmark Infrastructure, to invest another $225 million in Cerebras ahead of its IPO.
Foundation Capital, where Steve Vassallo led the investment and hosted Feldman in its offices during the company’s early days, has a stake worth about $5.3 billion.
Eclipse Ventures, led by founder Lior Susan, is valued at about $5.2 billion.
Investors also later saw significant gains. Fidelity, which led the $1.1 billion Series G round in September 2025 along with Atreides Management, remains the largest shareholder with 11.3 percent. The value of this share is approximately $3.8 billion at the IPO price. Tiger Global followed with a $1 billion Series H in February at a valuation of $23 billion.
A group of prominent angel investors will also benefit, including Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Adam D’Angelo, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Intel CEO Lip Bo Tan. Most of their stakes are too small to require full SEC disclosure, but some have emerged as part of the Musk v. Altman.
Filings in the case show that Altman owned roughly 89,000 shares as of Dec. 31, now worth about $27.8 million at post-IPO prices near $311. Brockman owns about 78,000 shares worth approximately $24.2 million.
These same filings reveal that OpenAI once explored acquiring Cerebras. In 2017, Brockman wrote that “exclusive access to Cerebras hardware would give OpenAI an overwhelming hardware advantage over Google.”
Years later, that relationship developed into a major business partnership. In January, OpenAI signed a multi-year computing agreement with Cerebras worth more than $20 billion for 750 megawatts of capacity through 2028. A separate $1 billion loan from OpenAI came in December 2025 with guarantees for more than 33 million shares, enough for a roughly 10% stake. The value of the additional guarantees could reach about $5 billion by the midpoint of the IPO, according to estimates from the Financial Times.
Cerebras’ blockbuster debut as IPO market reawakens. U.S. IPO proceeds have More than doubled since the beginning of the year In 2026, Cerebras will account for nearly a quarter of that total. Companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are expected to follow suit, and only SpaceX and OpenAI are expected to follow suit. Raising up to $135 billion combined.
