Part 1 covered Nebius's origin, cloud focus, and whale deals thus far. Part 2 looked at their strengths across their infrastructure and software architectures. Part 3 looked at their footprint, buildout efforts, and where they are going next.

Now let's look at their group operations (mgmt, GTM, and subsidiaries), financing strategy, and their evolving cloud stack.

  • FY25 was the first full year of life after being distracted in 2024 with its split and reemergence.
  • It was also a year of shifting financials due to "Group" adjustments. Numbers prior to Q225 are being restated following the reclassification of one of its side businesses to a minority stake (voting-wise), and Q225 also saw a one-time GAAP profit boost from a revaluation of ClickHouse.
  • Nebius was focused on the continued buildup of its C-suite and GTM across FY25, including adding a CMO & CRO and a replacement CFO.
  • The new CRO is building out their enterprise sales force and pipeline, but is already hitting capacity constraints. GTM is now working closely with the CPIO to better tie the pipeline to upcoming capacity.
  • They've had an equity-heavy approach to financing their buildout, across primary offerings and convertible notes.
  • Despite being "dilution-sensitive", this has led to 24% dilution over the TTM and a possible 37% in the near term. The current tranches of convertible notes (two issued in June, two in September) are likely to further dilute.
  • They went with both financing approaches (some dilution now, some later) in September to up their cash hoard to ~$5B in Q325 – just in time to see capex elevate to an estimated $3B in Q4.
  • Given their guidance that GPU capacity will 4x across 2026, mgmt will need to hit the financial well again in 2026.
  • Mgmt is also now hinting at moving into CoreWeave's style of financing – asset-/deal-backed forms of debt.
  • They have one primary cloud stack (AI Cloud), plus two standalone serverless platforms built atop it (Token Factory and TractoAI).
  • They have been steadily improving the enterprise features of AI Cloud, including security & compliance features in the Aether release that are important to regulated industries like finsvc, healthcare, and gov.
  • They have also added cluster resilience features, which could hopefully boost them into the top tier of ClusterMAX.
  • With the CRO hire completed, the CBO has shifted his attention to inference strategy. This focus resulted in the all-new Token Factory release in November, with a number of new enterprise features like model evaluation and fine-tuning.
  • Beyond the core platform, they have several investments and subsidiaries of interest in the "Group" across ClickHouse, Toloka, and Avride. Mgmt has hinted as using them for funding, but all of these are very early in their trajectory.  
  • Beyond the core AI (GPUaaS & AI Cloud), most of interest in the "Group" is ClickHouse. It was just valued at over $6B in a Series C, but is likely to IPO in the coming years.