AI cloud infrastructure startup CoreWeave said Wednesday that it has raised a whopping $1.1 billion in fresh funding in a round led by Coatue.

The deal values the company at $19 billion, per The Wall Street Journal. That represents an almost threefold increase from the company’s valuation just five months ago, when it was valued at $7 billion following a secondary sale, and a huge jump from its $2 billion valuation in a Series B extension last May.

Other investors in the new round include Magnetar Capital, which led CoreWeave’s last primary round, Altimeter Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Co. and Lykos Global Management. With the latest funding, the company has now raised some $4.6 billion, per Crunchbase data.

“CoreWeave is designed specifically to tackle the most complex and pressing challenges in high performance compute. With this new round, we will continue investing in and working with the largest AI enterprises in the world,” CoreWeave co-founder and CEO Mike Intrator said in a statement announcing the round.

The capital will be used to fund growth, including into new geographic markets amid “explosive demand for GPU accelerated cloud infrastructure worldwide,” according to the company.

Despite few funding deals last quarter on the magnitude of the CoreWeave raise, venture funding to AI-related startups increased slightly in Q1 2024 compared to Q4 2023, Crunchbase data shows. All told, around $12.2 billion was invested in venture-backed AI startups in 1,166 deals in Q1 —  a 4% uptick in dollar terms from last year’s final quarter, which saw $11.7 billion go to similar startups in 1,072 deals.

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Illustration: Dom Guzman