Cerebras Systems didn’t just go public this week; it minted billionaires and delivered one of the biggest venture paydays in years. The A.I. chip startup priced its IPO at $185 a share on Wednesday (May 13), above a range it had already raised twice. Shares opened at $350 on Thursday and closed at $311.07, valuing the company at roughly $95 billion. The $5.55 billion offering is the largest U.S. tech IPO since Uber in 2019 and the biggest semiconductor debut on record, serving as an early test of investor appetite for a wave of A.I. listings, including OpenAI and Anthropic later this year.
The momentum cooled slightly today, with shares falling about 5 percent intraday to around $293. Still, the IPO instantly created two billionaires and generated massive returns for a tight 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 roughly 5.5 percent of Cerebras, a stake now worth about $3.2 billion, according to Bloomberg. Co-founder and CTO Sean Lie holds a stake valued at approximately $1.6 billion.
Feldman is a serial entrepreneur with deep roots in Silicon Valley. He grew up on Stanford’s campus, where both his parents were professors, and later earned both a BA and an MBA from the university. Over the past two decades, he has helped take Riverstone Networks public and led marketing at Force10 Networks before its $800 million sale to Dell. Cerebras is his fourth company in semiconductors and data infrastructure and by far his biggest win.
Earlier this year, the company’s board approved what it described as a “moonshot” compensation package for Feldman, awarding additional stock tied to market-cap milestones. The timing underscores Cerebras’ rapid ascent: the company reported $510 million in revenue for 2025, up 76 percent year over year, and swung to $238 million in net income after a $481 million loss in 2024.
The biggest winners from the IPO also include the venture firms that backed Cerebras from the start.
Benchmark, Foundation Capital, and Eclipse Ventures co-led the company’s $27 million Series A in 2016. At Benchmark, Eric Vishria led the deal and remains on the board. The firm’s 8.1 percent stake was worth roughly $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, both called “Benchmark Infrastructure,” to invest another $225 million into Cerebras ahead of the IPO.
Foundation Capital, where Steve Vassallo led the investment and hosted Feldman in its offices during the company’s earliest days, now holds a stake valued at about $5.3 billion.
Eclipse Ventures, led by founder Lior Susan, sits on roughly $5.2 billion.
Later investors also saw significant gains. Fidelity, which led a $1.1 billion Series G round in September 2025 alongside Atreides Management, remains the largest shareholder at 11.3 percent. That stake is worth about $3.8 billion at the IPO price. Tiger Global followed with a $1 billion Series H in February at a $23 billion valuation.
A group of high-profile angel investors also stands to benefit, including Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Adam D’Angelo, Andy Bechtolsheim and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan. Most of their stakes are too small to require full SEC disclosure, but some surfaced as part of the Musk v. Altman lawsuit.
Filings in that case show Altman held roughly 89,000 shares as of December 31, now worth about $27.8 million at post-IPO prices near $311. Brockman held around 78,000 shares, valued at roughly $24.2 million.
Those 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.”
That relationship evolved years later into a major commercial partnership. In January, OpenAI signed a multi-year compute agreement with Cerebras worth more than $20 billion for 750 megawatts of capacity through 2028. A separate $1 billion loan from OpenAI in December 2025 came with warrants for more than 33 million shares, enough for roughly a 10 percent stake. Additional warrants could be worth about $5 billion at the IPO midpoint, according to Financial Times estimates.
Cerebras’ blockbuster debut lands as the IPO market reawakens. U.S. IPO proceeds have more than doubled year-to-date in 2026, with Cerebras accounting for roughly a quarter of that total. Companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are expected to follow, with SpaceX and OpenAI alone projected to raise as much as $135 billion combined.
