We’re pleased to share that the Fundrise Opportunistic Venture Fund has invested in Crusoe, a leading AI cloud and infrastructure company, as a part of its oversubscribed Series F financing. The $3.9 billion round led by Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, and Mubadala, values the company at $30.9 billion post-money.
The company’s existing backers include Founders Fund, NVIDIA, and Altimeter. Crusoe is trusted by AI leaders and hyperscalers like OpenAI, Oracle, and Microsoft as well as frontier AI companies like Fireworks AI, Perplexity, Cognition and Figure. For Opportunistic Venture Fund investors, this investment expands our exposure to a central theme of the AI boom: the infrastructure required to make it possible.
Crusoe is a leader in the emerging category of “neoclouds,” cloud providers purpose-built for training and running AI models. What makes Crusoe particularly compelling is how much of the process it controls. Crusoe has taken a vertically integrated approach, with capabilities that span land development, energy sourcing, data center construction, manufacturing of critical components, GPU chip rentals, and ultimately the generation of AI outputs, or tokens. In other words, the company is building the full-stack AI factory.
The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted Crusoe’s unique approach:
“Crusoe is unusual among AI infrastructure startups because it isn’t betting on a single way to make money. Many newer AI cloud providers, often referred to as neoclouds, are known primarily for buying expensive chips and renting access to them.
Crusoe makes money at several layers: developing and leasing data centers, renting out the GPUs inside them, or running AI models for customers and charging for the computing output, known as tokens.”
We believe Crusoe’s vertical integration can translate into faster deployment, greater resilience, better control over costs, and a decisive advantage in a rapidly evolving market where the bottlenecks are constantly shifting.
Crusoe’s second distinction is an energy first approach rooted in efficiency and resource conservation. Crusoe began by putting unused natural gas that would otherwise be flared (i.e. burned off) to productive use powering computing infrastructure. Today, its diversified energy strategy incorporates renewable sources such as solar, geothermal, and wind, alongside natural gas. Crusoe’s data center designs use efficient closed-loop, non-evaporative cooling, which puts their data centers' water consumption equivalent to that of an office building. We believe this resource-conscious engineering is both a business advantage as well as a key factor in earning the enthusiastic support of the local communities that they partner with.
We believe the physical buildout supporting AI will be one of the defining investment opportunities (and biggest challenges) of this decade. Delivering it will require uniquely innovative companies that can bring together energy, construction, hardware, and software at extraordinary scale while simultaneously being partners to the communities in which they are working. Crusoe’s ability to work across those disciplines is what makes the business so exciting, and why we’re pleased to now be long-term shareholders in this vision.
You can read more about Crusoe and the new funding here.