Nebius has raised $700M in an oversubscribed financing round to build its AI full-stack
Nebius raised $700 million in private placement financing from investors including Accel and NVIDIA, positioning itself to expand its AI infrastructure services and achieve an annual recurring revenue of $750 million to $1 billion by the end of 2025.
The publicly traded Netherlands-based company Nebius announced earlier this week it raised $700 million in private placement financing from "a select group of institutional and accredited investors" that includes Accel, NVIDIA, and accounts managed by Orbis Investments. As part of the private placement, Nebius will issue 33,333,334 Class A shares priced at $21, 3% more than the average price since October, when Nebius resumed trading on Nasdaq.
Additionally, Nebius has announced that its previous agreement to buy back some of its shares at a maximum repurchase price of $10.50 per share. The company's shareholders approved these plans after Nebius' divestment of its Russian businesses to give an exit to any investors who were uncomfortable with the company's change of focus to AI infrastructure. The decision not to repurchase Class A shares and the strategic financing have put Nebius well on the way to deliver an ARR of $750 million to $1 billion by the end of 2025.
The company was forced into a three-year hiatus imposed on companies in business with Russia. Nebius, previously Yandex N.V., was the parent company of the Russian search engine of the same name. Before adopting its new identity, Nebius sold the Russian businesses at a deep discount. Nebius remains the parent company of Texas-based Avride, a Netherlands-based AI company called Toloka, and the learning platform TripleTen, based in the US.
Nebius has bold plans for the future. The company is expanding its presence in Europe and making the jump to the United States market with co-locations (shared data centers) in Kansas and Paris. Nebius also plans to increase the capacity of its Finland location and invest in more proprietary data centers at "greenfield sites". In parallel, Nebius will continue to offer its Nebius GPU cloud service, which enables developers to manage the entire machine learning lifecycle, and its recently launched Nebius AI Studio, an inference service geared towards app builders, which enables access to state-of-the-art open-source models for an affordable price.
