CoreWeave is owned by its public shareholders, but co-founders Michael Intrator, Brian Venturo, and Brannin McBee retain effective control through super-voting Class B shares. CoreWeave is not a subsidiary of NVIDIA, Microsoft, Magnetar, or another parent company.

• CoreWeave trades on Nasdaq under the ticker CRWV.
• Michael Intrator held 38.70% of total voting power as of April 15, 2026.
• Brian Venturo and Brannin McBee held 20.30% and 14.59% of voting power.
• Magnetar-managed funds were the largest disclosed outside Class A holder.
• NVIDIA owned 10.66% of Class A stock, but only 3.27% of total voting power.

Who Owns CoreWeave Today?

CoreWeave’s ownership is divided between public Class A shareholders and founders holding Class B stock. The founders do not own every share, but the company’s dual-class structure gives them far more voting influence than their economic ownership alone would suggest.

Class A shares carry one vote each. Class B shares carry ten votes each. CoreWeave’s founders collectively held all outstanding Class B shares covered by the company’s April 2026 proxy ownership table.

Founder ownership and voting control

Together, CoreWeave’s executive officers and directors controlled 72.32% of total voting power. That gives the leadership group substantial influence over director elections, corporate governance, and other matters submitted to shareholders.

These figures represent beneficial ownership, which can include shares obtainable through options, awards, trusts, or other arrangements within the disclosure period. They should not be read simply as unrestricted shares held personally.

Largest disclosed outside shareholders

Magnetar controlled more disclosed Class A shares than any founder individually, but it did not control CoreWeave. Its one-vote Class A stock carried much less voting weight than the founders’ ten-vote Class B shares.

CoreWeave Company Snapshot

As of April 30, 2026, CoreWeave reported approximately 447.6 million Class A shares, 98.0 million Class B shares, and no outstanding Class C shares.

How Did CoreWeave’s Ownership Evolve?

CoreWeave began in 2017 as Atlantic Crypto, a cryptocurrency-mining operation founded by Intrator, Venturo, McBee, and Salanki. The company accumulated graphics processing units and later redirected that computing capacity toward cloud services and artificial intelligence workloads.

Private funding accelerated the transition. Magnetar became an important financial backer, while NVIDIA invested in CoreWeave and developed a broader supplier, customer, and strategic relationship with the company. Other investors participated during CoreWeave’s private-company phase, but not all remained reportable owners after the IPO.

CoreWeave completed its initial public offering in March 2025. The listing allowed outside investors to buy Class A shares while the founders retained Class B stock with ten votes per share. This preserved founder control after the company entered the public market.

In January 2026, NVIDIA invested another $2 billion, purchasing CoreWeave Class A stock at $87.20 per share. The transaction added roughly 23 million shares and nearly doubled NVIDIA’s position.

Does NVIDIA Own CoreWeave?

NVIDIA is a major shareholder and strategic partner, but it does not own or control CoreWeave.

CoreWeave’s April 2026 proxy listed NVIDIA as the beneficial owner of 47,213,353 Class A shares. That represented 10.66% of the Class A stock but only 3.27% of total voting power because NVIDIA did not hold the founders’ super-voting Class B shares.

The relationship is unusually close. CoreWeave builds its AI cloud around NVIDIA GPUs, sells infrastructure services to NVIDIA, and received major equity investments from the chipmaker. CoreWeave also disclosed that NVIDIA accounted for 17% of its supplier purchases in 2025.

That commercial interdependence can make NVIDIA appear like a parent company. Legally and operationally, however, CoreWeave remains an independent public corporation led and controlled by its founders.

Microsoft and OpenAI are also important customers or business partners, not CoreWeave’s owners. A large contract does not provide corporate control unless it comes with equity or voting rights.

What Is Changing in CoreWeave’s Ownership?

CoreWeave’s economic ownership can change as investors buy or sell Class A shares, employees exercise equity awards, and the company issues stock to finance expansion. Voting control changes more slowly because it is concentrated in Class B shares.

Transfers of Class B stock generally cause those shares to convert into Class A stock, with limited exceptions for approved estate-planning, trust, or charitable transfers. Founder sales can therefore reduce super-voting control over time.

CoreWeave disclosed a March 2026 Rule 10b5-1 plan under which Brannin McBee and related entities could potentially sell or convert several million shares, subject to the plan’s conditions. A plan authorizes possible transactions; it does not prove that every covered share will be sold.

The dual-class structure also has an expiration mechanism. Class B shares must automatically convert no later than May 31, 2032, unless an earlier triggering event occurs. One trigger relates to Michael Intrator no longer devoting substantially all of his working time to CoreWeave.

How Does CoreWeave’s Ownership Compare With Its Rivals?

CoreWeave differs from traditional cloud providers because it is publicly traded yet founder-controlled.

• Amazon Web Services is wholly owned by Amazon.
• Microsoft Azure operates within Microsoft.
• Google Cloud belongs to Alphabet.
• Lambda remains privately held and investor-backed.
• CoreWeave has public shareholders, but its founders hold the dominant voting position.

This structure gives public investors economic exposure to CoreWeave’s AI cloud growth without giving them voting influence proportional to the number of ordinary shares they own.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is CoreWeave owned by NVIDIA?

No. NVIDIA is a major Class A shareholder, supplier, customer, and strategic partner, but CoreWeave’s founders hold most of the voting power.

Who is CoreWeave’s largest shareholder?

It depends on the measure. Magnetar-managed funds were the largest disclosed outside Class A holder in CoreWeave’s April 2026 proxy. Michael Intrator had the greatest individual voting power because of his Class B shares.

Does Michael Intrator own CoreWeave?

Intrator does not own the entire company. He was its most powerful individual shareholder, with 38.70% of total voting power as of April 15, 2026.

Is CoreWeave public or private?

CoreWeave is a public company. Its Class A stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker CRWV.

Who founded CoreWeave?

CoreWeave identifies Michael Intrator, Brian Venturo, Brannin McBee, and Peter Salanki as co-founders.

Does Microsoft own part of CoreWeave?

Microsoft was not listed among CoreWeave’s disclosed 5% shareholders in the April 2026 proxy. It has been an important customer, but customer contracts do not establish ownership.

Can public shareholders take control of CoreWeave?

It would be difficult while the founders retain substantial Class B holdings. Each Class B share has ten votes, compared with one vote for a Class A share.

The post Who Owns CoreWeave and Who Actually Controls It? appeared first on AI Funding Tracker.

Midjourney is an independent, privately held AI company founded and led by David Holz. The company says it is self-funded, has no outside investors, no controlling parent company, and no advertisers.

• Founder and CEO: David Holz
• Legal operator: Midjourney, Inc.
• Ownership type: Private and founder-led
• Outside investors: None disclosed
• Parent company: None
• Exact founder stake: Not publicly disclosed

Who Owns Midjourney Today?

David Holz is the founder, CEO, and central controlling figure behind Midjourney. However, Midjourney has not published a cap table or disclosed Holz’s exact percentage ownership, so it would be inaccurate to assign him a specific stake.

The clearest evidence comes from Midjourney itself. Its careers page describes the company as a small, self-funded team with “no investors, no big company controlling us, and no advertisers.” In 2025, Holz also said Midjourney remained an independent, community-backed research lab with no investors when announcing a technology partnership with Meta.

That structure means Midjourney is not owned by Google, Microsoft, Meta, Discord, Elon Musk, or a venture capital firm. Customers fund the company mainly through paid subscriptions and related products. Although Midjourney works with large technology platforms, commercial partnerships do not automatically create an ownership stake.

The safest ownership summary is therefore:

1. David Holz founded and leads the company.
2. Midjourney, Inc. operates the service as a private company.
3. No external shareholder or parent company has been publicly identified.
4. The exact distribution of shares among Holz and any employees is private.

Midjourney Company Snapshot

Midjourney calls itself an independent research lab focused on design, human infrastructure, and artificial intelligence. Its best-known product converts natural-language prompts into images and, more recently, video.

How Did David Holz Build Midjourney?

Holz built Midjourney after co-founding Leap Motion, a motion-control hardware startup. His experience with a heavily venture-funded company appears to have shaped Midjourney’s different approach: a small team, direct customer revenue, and no publicly announced venture capital.

Midjourney began operating in 2021 and opened its image-generation service to the public in July 2022. Instead of building a traditional social platform immediately, it distributed the product through Discord. That gave users a place to create images together while allowing Midjourney to reach a large audience without a conventional consumer-app launch.

The company became profitable early, according to Holz’s 2022 interviews. Subscription revenue allowed it to finance model training, computing costs, hiring, and product development without selling publicly disclosed equity to investors.

Midjourney later expanded beyond its Discord-first model by developing a web interface, image-editing tools, video generation, and other research projects. The company’s growth did not change its stated ownership position: it continued to describe itself as independent and self-funded.

How Does Midjourney Fit Into the AI Industry?

Midjourney occupies an unusual position among major generative AI companies. Many competitors have raised billions of dollars, accepted strategic investments, or operate inside larger technology groups. Midjourney has instead relied on revenue from its user community.

That independence can give management more control over product direction because outside investors are not publicly pressuring the company for a particular growth schedule or exit. It also concentrates decision-making around Holz and the internal team.

Midjourney still depends on outside infrastructure and partnerships. It has used cloud-computing resources, built its early community around Discord, and licensed aesthetic technology to Meta. These relationships are commercially important, but none has been disclosed as an acquisition or equity investment.

The company also faces the same industry pressures as other AI developers, including high computing costs, growing competition, content-moderation challenges, and copyright litigation over training data and generated outputs.

What Is Changing at Midjourney in 2026?

Midjourney’s scope is expanding well beyond its original text-to-image product.

The company made V8.1 its default image model on June 10, 2026, following its April release. It has also introduced additional web features and faster draft-generation tools, showing that image creation remains a core priority.

More surprisingly, Midjourney announced Midjourney Medical in June 2026. The project aims to develop a rapid full-body ultrasound scanning system and a wellness-focused scanning experience. Midjourney says its first spa is planned for San Francisco in 2027, although medical experts have questioned whether the company has published enough evidence to support comparisons with established imaging methods.

Midjourney also announced its first acquisition in late July 2026. The transaction signals that the company may use its internally generated cash to buy technology or teams rather than raise venture capital. The announcement did not indicate that Midjourney itself had been sold or that its ownership structure had changed.

These moves matter because Midjourney is evolving from a single-product AI image company into a broader research organization. For now, the company still publicly presents itself as independent and investor-free.

How Does Midjourney’s Ownership Compare With Competitors?

• OpenAI: Operates through a more complex nonprofit and for-profit structure and has received major outside investment.
• Stability AI: A privately held generative AI company that has raised venture funding and undergone leadership changes.
• Adobe Firefly: Owned and operated by publicly traded Adobe.
• Google Imagen: Developed inside Alphabet-owned Google.
• Microsoft Designer: Developed within publicly traded Microsoft.
• Midjourney: Privately held, founder-led, self-funded, and not controlled by a larger technology company.

Midjourney’s closest distinction is not simply product quality. It is the absence of disclosed venture investors or a corporate parent despite competing with some of the world’s best-funded AI platforms.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Midjourney owned by David Holz?

David Holz founded and leads Midjourney, and available evidence indicates that he is its principal controlling figure. However, the company has not disclosed his exact shareholding or a complete ownership table.

Is Midjourney owned by Discord?

No. Midjourney originally used Discord as the main interface and community platform for its image generator, but Discord does not publicly own Midjourney.

Did Meta buy Midjourney?

No. Meta announced a licensing and technical collaboration with Midjourney in 2025. Both companies described Midjourney as remaining independent, and no acquisition or equity investment was announced.

Is Midjourney publicly traded?

No. Midjourney is a private company, so its shares are not available on a public stock exchange.

Does Midjourney have venture capital investors?

Midjourney says it has no investors and is supported by its community. No venture capital funding round has been publicly announced.

Who owns images created with Midjourney?

Midjourney’s current terms say users own the assets they create to the fullest extent allowed by applicable law, subject to the agreement and third-party rights. Copyright protection for largely AI-generated work can still depend on jurisdiction and the level of human authorship.

Could Midjourney be acquired?

A future acquisition is possible because Midjourney is privately held, but there is no public evidence as of August 5, 2026 that the company is for sale or controlled by an outside buyer.

The post Who Owns Midjourney in 2026? Founder and Ownership Explained appeared first on AI Funding Tracker.

Quick Answer

Perplexity AI is owned by its four co-founders, employees with equity, and outside investors. CEO Aravind Srinivas is the company’s most visible founder, but no reliable public disclosure shows that he or any other shareholder owns a controlling majority.

• Perplexity AI is a privately held company, not a public stock.
• Its co-founders are Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski.
• Major reported investors include Accel, IVP, New Enterprise Associates, Nvidia, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
• Jeff Bezos, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and other prominent individuals have also invested.
• A September 2025 funding report valued Perplexity at about $20 billion, although Reuters could not independently verify the reported round.

Who Owns Perplexity AI Today?

Perplexity AI’s ownership is divided among its founders, current and former employees, venture-capital firms, strategic investors, and angel investors. Because the company is private, the percentages held by these groups are not publicly available.

The four co-founders

Aravind Srinivas co-founded Perplexity and serves as CEO. Denis Yarats is a co-founder and chief technology officer, while Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski helped build the company’s technical and strategic foundation. NEA’s account of its investment identifies all four as members of the founding team.

The founders almost certainly received common stock when the company was formed. However, later funding rounds would normally dilute their percentage stakes as new shares were issued to investors and employees. Dilution does not necessarily mean the founders lost operational influence, particularly when voting rights, board seats, and executive positions are considered.

Institutional and strategic investors

Perplexity has raised more than $1 billion in venture investment, according to company descriptions posted through Accel’s portfolio job board. Named backers include Accel, IVP, NEA, Nvidia, Samsung, and other firms. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 has also been widely reported as an investor.

These investors generally receive preferred shares, which can carry economic protections or approval rights that differ from the common stock held by founders and employees. Their ownership may be financially significant without giving any one investor outright control.

Individual investors

Reported individual backers include Jeff Bezos, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Shopify co-founder Tobi Lütke. Being an investor does not make Bezos, Nvidia, or any other named backer the “owner” of Perplexity in the everyday sense. Each appears to hold a minority interest within a broader shareholder group.

No public source establishes that one shareholder controls more than 50% of Perplexity’s voting power. In practice, Srinivas and the executive team direct daily operations, while the board and major investors may influence financing, governance, and major corporate transactions.

Perplexity AI Company Snapshot

Perplexity describes itself as an AI-powered answer engine that supplies current responses supported by sources. Its products combine web search with large language models, allowing users to ask follow-up questions and receive a direct answer rather than only a list of links.

How Did Perplexity’s Ownership Develop?

Perplexity was founded in 2022 by a team with experience in AI research, machine learning, ranking systems, and technology-company development. Srinivas previously conducted research at organizations including OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind. Yarats worked in AI research and machine learning, while Ho brought technical and strategy experience. Konwinski was also a co-founder of Databricks.

NEA led Perplexity’s Series A financing. A January 2024 Series B raised $73.6 million and was led by IVP, with participation from Nvidia, Bezos Expeditions, NEA, Databricks, and other investors. Further rounds brought in additional capital and raised the company’s valuation.

Reuters reported in May 2025 that Accel was expected to lead a $500 million financing at a $14 billion valuation. In September 2025, Reuters cited a report that Perplexity had secured commitments for another $200 million at a $20 billion valuation. Reuters said it could not independently verify that later report, so the $20 billion figure should be treated as a reported private-market valuation rather than an audited measure of value.

Each round likely expanded the investor group and diluted earlier shareholders. The exact impact cannot be calculated without Perplexity’s cap table, share classes, option pool, and financing documents.

Where Does Perplexity Fit in the AI Industry?

Perplexity sits between a search engine, an AI assistant, and a research platform. It competes with Google Search and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI’s products, Anthropic’s Claude, and other conversational AI services.

The company is independent rather than a subsidiary of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, or OpenAI. It uses infrastructure and AI models supplied by several technology companies, but commercial dependence is not the same as ownership. Perplexity’s Android listing, for example, says the service uses models from providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.

Its revenue comes from products such as Perplexity Pro, enterprise subscriptions, and the Sonar API. A broader product range can improve the company’s bargaining position, but its high computing costs also make continued access to capital and infrastructure strategically important.

What Is Changing at Perplexity in 2026?

Perplexity is expanding beyond question answering into agentic browsing, shopping, and task completion. That shift could make its technology more valuable, while also increasing legal and platform risk.

On August 4, 2026, a U.S. appeals court overturned an injunction that had restricted Perplexity’s AI shopping tools from operating on Amazon. The ruling addressed whether users or Perplexity were responsible for the relevant access and may influence how AI agents interact with online platforms.

Days earlier, a federal judge allowed significant parts of Reddit’s data-scraping lawsuit against Perplexity and associated providers to continue. Perplexity disputes the allegations. These cases do not change who owns the company, but legal costs, licensing agreements, and platform restrictions can affect valuation and the terms investors demand in future rounds.

Ownership could also change through new financing, employee equity grants, secondary share sales, an acquisition, or an eventual initial public offering. Perplexity has not announced a public listing, so ordinary investors cannot currently buy its shares on a stock exchange.

How Does Perplexity’s Ownership Compare With Its Rivals?

Perplexity resembles Anthropic and xAI in being a privately financed AI company with prominent founders and large outside investors. It differs from Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot, which are products of publicly traded parent companies. OpenAI has a more complex organizational and governance structure than a conventional venture-backed startup.

The key point is that Perplexity remains an independent private company. Strategic partnerships with Nvidia, model access from OpenAI or Anthropic, and disputes with Amazon or Reddit do not make those companies its owners.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Perplexity AI owned by Google?

No. Google does not own Perplexity AI. Perplexity is an independent private company and competes with Google in search and AI-assisted research.

Does Jeff Bezos own Perplexity AI?

Jeff Bezos is a reported investor through Bezos Expeditions, but there is no evidence that he owns a controlling stake. He is one shareholder among founders, institutions, employees, and other investors.

Is Nvidia the owner of Perplexity?

No. Nvidia is an investor and an important technology provider. Its relationship with Perplexity includes funding and computing infrastructure, but no public disclosure shows that Nvidia controls the company.

How much of Perplexity does Aravind Srinivas own?

Perplexity has not disclosed Srinivas’s exact ownership percentage. Estimates that assign him a precise stake are speculative unless supported by a company filing, cap table, or direct statement.

Can I buy Perplexity AI stock?

Perplexity does not have publicly traded shares or a stock symbol. Some accredited investors may obtain exposure through private secondary transactions, but availability, pricing, fees, and shareholder rights can differ substantially from public stock.

What is Perplexity AI worth?

The latest widely reported benchmark is a $20 billion private valuation from September 2025. That figure reflects the reported price of a financing round, not the company’s revenue, cash balance, or guaranteed sale value.

Who is the CEO of Perplexity AI?

Aravind Srinivas is Perplexity’s co-founder and CEO. His executive role gives him substantial operational influence, but it does not prove that he holds majority economic ownership.

The post Who Owns Perplexity AI? Founders, Investors, and Structure In 2026 appeared first on AI Funding Tracker.