CoreWeave began trading on Friday with more of a shrug than a war cry. The company priced at $40 on Thursday, below the $47 to $50 price range announced. It also trimmed the number of shares offered.

All told, CoreWeave raised $1.5 billion and nabbed a $14 billion market cap on Day 1, instead of a hoped-for $3 billion+ raise and a much higher valuation. Shares also opened at $39 (ouch!) and closed at $40. A lukewarm reception.

Still, the company’s IPO lands as the largest AI-related listing to date, and the biggest U.S. tech IPO since the heady days of 2021.

Sitting in an ordinary white hoodie in a bland conference room and talking with a detectable Jersey accent, chief strategy officer Brian Venturo told TechCrunch that he feels very lucky.

That’s because it all started when he and his hedge fund friends had some extra time on their hands after their last venture together went south.

He had been working as portfolio manager for the energy industry hedge fund Hudson Ridge Asset Management, founded by CoreWeave co-founder and CEO Michael Intrator. They had built a machine learning model to help them pick investments in the data-heavy energy industry. There they met their co-founder, Brannin McBee, who ran the data firm they used.

But after the U.S. veered into its fracking boom era, they closed Hudson Ridge, leaving “a lot of time on our hands,” Venturo says.

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Next up: crypto. The wanted to get in, but first “wanted to understand from the commodity side, how is this made,” Venturo said. “So we started doing mining on the pool table in our Manhattan office.”

Thousands of GPUs in a warehouse

Like eating potato chips, one GPU turned into 10. Ten turned into 1,000. The rigs moved from pool table to closet.

“Next thing we knew, we were in the most cliché place possible. We were in my grandfather’s garage in New Jersey,” he joked. Then their friends in finance wanted in so they bought more.

“We were the largest Ethereum miner in the world for like two and a half years,” he says. “At one point, we had 50,000 Nvidia consumer GPUs.”

These were chips meant for playing video games on consumer PCs, not running 24/7 in “a warehouse with no air-conditioning or no ventilation,” he said. So the co-founders built “crazy automation and health-checking [systems] to run these low-grade GPUs in the harshest environments.”

The team knew they wanted to use their GPU empire for other things, like maybe AI training. But they also needed to learn how.

So they connected with EleutherAI, an open source group working on a large language model. CoreWeave offered access to their GPUs in exchange for help learning about AI training and announced a partnership in 2022.

“We thought we were just going to learn how the infrastructure worked,” Venturo says. But EleutherAI was working with hundreds of people building AI startups and “it was this total springboard moment for us.”

The good will from working with EleutherAI led these startups to become paid customers. It was “total luck [that] started the training business,” Venturo said.

Stability AI got wind of CoreWeave through EleutherAI and became a customer. The founders needed more capital to build better infrastructure.

They went to dinner with Magnetar investors, and “I was literally pounding on the dinner table,” convincing them of the future of AI, Venturo said. He said Magnetar wrote them a $100 million check.

Open source paves the way

OpenAI learned of CoreWeave through its work with the open source community. And Microsoft learned of the company through OpenAI. Microsoft became its biggest customer because it was OpenAI’s biggest investor and sole cloud provider at the time.

That’s no longer the case. And OpenAI recently signed a $12 billion deal of its own with CoreWeave, bumping Microsoft from being its biggest customer.

Today CoreWeave has 32 data centers and 250,000 GPUs, including Nvidia’s difficult-to-obtain Blackwell chips, which supports AI reasoning, the company says.

Venturo acknowledges that much has been made about CoreWeave’s jaw-dropping $7.6 billion in debt, much of it due to be repaid in two years, the Financial Times reports. Against CoreWeave’s $1.9 billion in revenue (even with, it says, $15 billion under contract), the debt is a big reason why investors have been cautious.

However, Venturo insisted that CoreWeave has structured each customer deal to cover the debt used to buy the GPUs needed. More than that, though, he realizes that three hedge fund guys turned crypto miners who are now running an influential AI training infrastructure have been on a wild ride.

“There’s so many pieces of luck along the way, it’s crazy,” he said.

Digital payments platform Stripe invites customers to join its management team meetings on a bi-weekly basis so it can get “candid feedback,” according to co-founder Patrick Collison.

In an April 8 post on X, the fintech giant’s CEO said the company has a customer join for the first 30 minutes of the meeting, which is attended by about 40 leaders “from across Stripe.”

“Even though we already have a lot of customer feedback mechanisms, it somehow always spurs new thoughts and investigations,” he wrote.

It’s an interesting strategy from Stripe, which was founded in 2010 and is considered to be the highest-valued private fintech in the world (its most recent valuation was $91.5 billion).

Over the years, startups have complained anecdotally that Stripe is more focused on its larger customers than the smaller ones it set out to serve. But the company must be doing something right. Stripe’s annual letter in February penned by Collison noted that payment volume in 2024 grew to $1.4 trillion, up 38% on the year before.

Stripe also added in the letter that it is now used by half of the Fortune 100 companies, underscoring how it has catapulted from a startup working with other startups into a major enterprise player.

In the post on X, Collison responded to the Cloudflare CTO’s question of when his company would get an invite with a, “Would love to have you guys…will reach out.”

To the point of smaller businesses feeling neglected, one investor wrote: “Hi Patrick – you know I admire @Stripe – but you should pay attention to the extent things have degraded for the indie community using Stripe. I messaged support a week ago – no reply, things are super complicated. There’s more stuff, but it’s a mess.”

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Many praised the move, with one user noting: “Love this. Keeps the culture focused on what matters and helps reconciles (sic) reality.”

And, naturally, some Stripe customers used the X post to post their complaints (here and here).

However, one high-profile founder seemed to approve of Stripe’s approach: Elon Musk replied to the post with a simple, “Good idea.”

Digital checkout company Bolt, like other fintechs, is riding a wave of economic and regulatory change roiling the industry, thanks partly to the ascent of the Trump administration and the changes unfolding in Washington.

Bolt President Justin Grooms attended the industry Fintech Meetup conference in Las Vegas earlier this month and heard a lot of talk about how those changes may affect the industry.

In an interview with Payments Dive shortly after the event on March 18, he touched on the impact of leadership changes happening in Washington, including at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Reserve, and how they will dovetail with industry changes already underway. For one thing, the Trump-propelled shift toward digital assets will have an impact on fintechs like his.

Justin Grooms Permission granted by Stephanie Tan

Grooms also noted how U.S. payments evolution has been driven by fintechs, such as buy now, pay later firms, as well as novel ideas, like the emergence of stablecoins, all of which are causing upheaval and competition for legacy payments players, including banks.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

PAYMENTS DIVE: Did you hear anything interesting with respect to the idea of states becoming more active in regulation in the payments and fintech sphere?

JUSTIN GROOMS: I didn’t hear a broad discussion around that, but what I did hear some discussion about that was interesting is a pick-up in applications for money transfer licenses more broadly. We think about these walls kind of falling down around banking, or at least being challenged…even very powerful fintechs that have a lot of cash don’t generally sit on ten billion (dollars) of assets under management, so they don’t always hit that classical Fed threshold of what it takes to be a bank type financial institution… So, with Michelle Bowman’s nomination to be the vice chair of the Fed, she’s historically said, ‘Hey, that number might be too high,’ which all of a sudden makes banking more manageable for fintechs to look at.

And the second thing is that some people that we spoke to that are in the business of helping companies get and manage (money transmitter licenses) were saying business has picked up a lot for us recently, which is interesting to me, because I don’t think the biggest fintechs are out there looking to spool up MTLs. This means to me, there might be a lot of innovation happening in the smaller fintechs.

Anything else striking to come out of the conference presentations?

I think the biggest thing is just this concept around banks trying to get more creative in how they market their existing products. So, regarding buy now, pay later, there is this amazing situation where these banks offer built-in BNPL capabilities themselves as part of their financial banking products, but consumers are still adopting the branded BNPLs, like the Klarnas and Afterpays and such, at much higher rates than what the banks can get folks to use on their existing cards. There was a lot of discussion that was interesting to me about the need for the banks to partner with companies like Klarna to access that visibility. There was some discussion that was very self-aware coming out of the banks like we need to find better ways to to market our products in a language that speaks to consumers.

Speaking of Klarna, what do you think Walmart’s strategy might be in changing up its BNPL partners, moving from Affirm to Klarna?

My knee-jerk reaction would be that Klarna did give them a better deal. I think that Klarna seems to be clearly driving their business towards growth, as opposed to building profits at this time. I take them at their word when they say that they want to be everywhere.

Turning to current politics, what’s your take on legislative proposals, like the one in Congress to cap credit card interest rates at 10%, actually becoming law?

The vibe that seems to be emerging right now is the willingness to challenge norms and status quo in how people access finance, financial tools in their life.

What may all this change mean for Bolt?

What’s exciting to me is that some of these concepts that are going to shake up the industry, from a deregulation perspective, and challenging, essentially is that we’re going to see, from my perspective, more of these niche products emerge, different ways of paying. Stablecoin is starting to get some real traction – this concept of being able to work with different types of digital currencies. I think pay-by-bank payments are slowly getting more and more accepted, especially for people that want to move money quickly. What’s exciting to us is that this really puts in a strong need for an identity layer to give consumers agency over all of this.

The fintech industry is evolving at lightning speed. Startups are bringing new payment solutions to market, banks are adopting fintech strategies, and the demand for seamless financial experiences is growing. But behind every great fintech innovation lies a major challenge: security, compliance, and scalability.

To understand what fintech founders need to navigate these challenges, we spoke with Pavel Kaminsky, an expert in secure payment environments and PCI DSS compliance (PCI DSS is a global security standard applying to all organizations that process, store, transmit, or impact the security of payment cards data). As the founder & CEO of 7Security GmbH, he helps fintechs and payment service providers worldwide implement PCI DSS requirements in a way that’s cost-effective and scalable. He also serves as a mentor for fintech programs like VISA Innovation Program, Level39, and Startupbootcamp, and as an advisory board member and awards judge at MPE Berlin.

With years of experience working with startups, Kaminsky shares his insights on what it takes to succeed in fintech today.

FinTech vs. banks: the lines are blurring

The line between fintech startups and traditional banks is blurring fast.

“Banks are becoming fintechs, and fintechs are becoming banks,” Kaminsky says. Many banks now have their own fintech divisions, while startups are securing banking licenses to offer a broader range of services. This creates both new opportunities and new regulatory hurdles for fintech founders.

One of the biggest challenges? Compliance.

“Many fintechs underestimate how complex financial regulations are. Each country has its own banking rules, and navigating them slows down expansion,” Kaminsky explains.

While the European Union offers a unified market, fintechs still face different financial regulations in each country, making scaling across borders a slow and expensive process.

Security is another major roadblock. Many startups focus so much on growth that they overlook security and compliance—until it becomes a problem. Kaminsky helps fintechs build secure payment environments without killing their agility.

“The most secure system is one that’s turned off,” he jokes. “But that doesn’t work for a business. The goal is to find the right balance—strong security, but in a way that still allows fast growth.”

His approach has already helped several fintech startups scale, proving that compliance doesn’t have to slow you down—it can actually accelerate growth when done right.

Why CEE is a FinTech powerhouse & what founders need to win

Kaminsky sees huge potential in Central and Eastern Europe as a fintech innovation hub. The region has already produced some major success stories—one standout example is SoftPOS technology, which allows merchants to accept payments on their phones without needing extra hardware.

Why is this sector booming in CEE? Kaminsky believes founders in emerging markets have a unique advantage:

“They have energy, creativity, and the ability to do a lot with very little,” he says. Without the deep pockets of Silicon Valley, CEE fintech founders have to innovate smarter.

However, fintech startups in the region still face hurdles. According to Kaminsky, three key things would help them succeed:

Simplified regulations – A more unified fintech regulatory framework in the EU would allow startups to grow without hitting compliance roadblocks in every country. Stronger security strategies – Founders need to build security into their products early , rather than treating it as an afterthought. Access to funding & mentorship – Connecting with investors and experienced fintech mentors can accelerate a startup’s journey from idea to market leader.

Kaminsky also emphasizes that fintech isn’t just about better technology—it’s about better experiences for users.

“Innovations like split payments, buy-now-pay-later, and seamless mobile payments all focus on making transactions feel effortless. That’s where fintech is heading: making payments disappear into the background.”

The future of payments

So, what’s next for fintech? Kaminsky predicts embedded finance will revolutionize payments, where transactions happen automatically without users even noticing.

“Your car will pay for gas on its own. Your fridge will reorder groceries. The idea is ‘buy anything, anywhere’—without even thinking about it,” he says.

While biometric payments, like face recognition for transactions, sound futuristic, Kaminsky is sceptical about their success.

“They look cool but come with privacy concerns, and most consumers don’t trust them yet,” he explains. Instead, he sees software-based payment solutions—where any device can act as a payment terminal—as the real game-changer.

Meet Pavel Kaminsky at Money Motion

If you want to hear more about fintech’s future, Pavel Kaminsky will be speaking at Money Motion in Zagreb, the conference taking place on March 27-28.

“I love how fast this conference is growing,” he says. “It’s becoming a true Balkan fintech hub, connecting startups, investors, and industry leaders. This year, their goal is to make sure at least one startup secures an investment during the event,” Kaminsky says. “That’s the kind of fintech conference we need—one that actually helps startups grow.”

Tickets and detailed information about the Money Motion 2025 conference program are available on the official website.

Agricultural lending remains a problem in need of a solution. There are over 30 million smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for 80% of all farms and providing around 70% of the region’s food, according to The International Fund for Agricultural Development. But they are still almost entirely absent from the loan book of traditional banks.

“Smallholder farmers are very fragmented,” says Benjamin Njenga, co-founder and CCO of Kenyan agri-fintech firm Apollo Agriculture. “They don’t keep farm records. They have no bank accounts. They have a productive asset – land. But they can’t get the money to invest in tools to succeed.”

Economies of scale

Mobile money is a critical enabler of the agri-fintech revolution, which enables fintechs like Apollo to transact with any client holding a mobile phone in any location that has mobile coverage. But this is not enough to make serving a single farmer with a one-acre plot commercially viable. What agri-fintech also provides is scale, by weaving together many farming clients into one cost-effective portfolio.

Smallholder farmers are very fragmented. They don’t keep farm records. They have no bank accounts. They have a productive asset – land. But they can’t get the money to invest in tools to succeed. Benjamin Njenga, co-founder and CCO of Apollo Agriculture

Remote sensing data allows agri-fintech firms to see the type of house a farmer has and the assets on his land. Satellite data can also provide yield estimates and weather projections. “AI and machine learning technologies allow you to use alternative data sets to build customer profiles and make a lending decision remotely,” says Njenga. “It enables you to serve that smallholder farmer in a scalable and profitable way.” When communicating with farming clients, online voice tools are helping overcome the hurdles of financial and digital literacy.

The potential for agri-fintech to truly transform rural agriculture also hinges on a more comprehensive approach to lending. Apollo’s financing comprises multiple different inputs in one package. “You get the seeds, you get the fertiliser, you get crop protection, you get agronomy training – everything bundled together,” says Njenga.

Global agri-fintech firm Pula Advisors – which also started out in its home market of Kenya – is focused on insurance and devised a similar approach. The firm created a new tech-based system for assessing risk to develop an insurance product that is sold to farmers along with crop seeds. The strength of this packaged approach and the underlying infrastructure is such that global insurers are willing to provide reinsurance, says Efayomi Carr, principal at Flourish

Ventures – an early-stage investor in both Pula and Apollo. “Economies of scale have allowed them to deliver a product with attractive unit economics in a way that didn’t exist even three years ago,” he says.

Bringing in the banks

It is no coincidence that the two of the largest and most successful African agri-fintech firms – Apollo and Pula – started in Kenya. Deep mobile money penetration, a supportive regulator and a rural farming population open to technological adoption are all key ingredients present in Kenya. But there are other markets with similar promise. Apollo has already expanded into Zambia, and Njenga says Tanzania holds promise. Pula has insured over 20 million farmers and is active in multiple markets including Senegal, Mozambique and Ethiopia.

In addition to the right market conditions, agri-fintech needs working capital. Apollo and Pula have a first mover advantage that has attracted early-stage investors like Flourish. More recently, Apollo has been in discussion with local banks,

Economies of scale have allowed them to deliver a product with attractive unit economics in a way that didn’t exist even three years ago Efayomi Carr, principal at Flourish Ventures

who Njenga describes as “at least open to having conversations”. The sheer volume of capital that Apollo has managed to deploy already shows it is serious, and its agricultural loan book is already larger than that of many lenders in Kenya and Zambia. But Njenga still thinks it will require fundamental changes in terms of how commercial banks think about agriculture to get them comfortable with extending more funds for agri-fintech.

The IFC is well aware of the potential and recently finished several cycles of pilot studies working with agri-fintech firms and financial institutions. Aliou Maiga, the IFC’s regional industry director, financial institutions group for Africa, says a pilot in Morocco resulted in 100% repayment and clear increases in farmers income and yield. Babban Gona, a Nigeria agri-fintech firm that has partnered with the IFC, already services some 100,000 farmers and wants to reach millions in the coming years.

By servicing a portfolio of smallholder farmers and providing a detailed dashboard of that portfolio, agri-fintech firms can – in theory – give banks the necessary visibility on risk to extend funding. Maiga agrees that enticing banks to fund agri-fintech is a key challenge, but says the IFC can leverage its network of financial institutions to connect agri-fintech firms and banks. The IFC could also play a vital role in building capacity within banks to manage agriculture lending. Even with an agri-fintech firm servicing the portfolio, commercial lenders will need staff that can assess and understand the agricultural sector, says Maiga.

“The potential and pipeline that we have is actually massive because all banks are interested in this – as long as you can de-risk and service the portfolio for them,” he says. “I would anticipate you’ll see a really big pick-up [in agri-fintech] in the next one to three years.”