Circle’s profits will soar as it mints more stablecoins.
CoreWeave’s business is booming as the AI market continues to expand.
Plenty of tech companies went public over the past year, but some of those tech IPOs have already fizzled out amid intensifying macro headwinds. Two of the better IPOs that resisted that sell-off were Circle (NYSE: CRCL) and CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV).
Circle's stock has more than quadrupled from its IPO price of $31, while CoreWeave's stock has nearly tripled from its IPO price of $40. Let's see why these two tech IPOs impressed the market, and why they're still worth buying in this frothy market this month.
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Circle, which went public last June, is the issuer of USD Coin (CRYPTO: USDC), a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar and backed by its own cash and U.S. Treasuries.
Stablecoins can be used to settle cross-border transactions faster and more cheaply than conventional SWIFT interbank transfers. They're also an appealing way for people to preserve their savings in countries with currency devaluation issues without buying actual U.S. dollars. Stablecoins can also be staked (locked up) on centralized exchanges and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols to earn yields that are often higher than those at traditional banks.
Circle earns interest from the bank deposits and short-term Treasuries, which it holds to back USD Coin. That reserve interest income accounts for most of its profits.
If the market's demand for USD Coin rises, it will mint more coins and accumulate more cash and Treasuries to back them, thereby boosting its reserve interest income. However, the latest Senate draft of the U.S. Clarity Act -- the proposed regulatory framework for all cryptocurrencies -- could limit the ways stablecoins can earn yields.
The latest proposed limitations will permit activity-based rewards but ban yields on passive stablecoin balances, which could make stablecoins less appealing than conventional savings accounts. But even if the Clarity Act curbs market demand for stablecoins, Circle can continue to generate interest income from its current reserves while growing transaction and subscription fees from its APIs, digital wallets, and other applications.
From 2025 to 2028, analysts expect its revenue and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) to grow at CAGRs of 26% and 32%, respectively. With an enterprise value of $25 billion, it still looks reasonably valued at 27 times this year's adjusted EBITDA -- making it a great play on the nascent stablecoin market.
CoreWeave, which went public last March, was once an Ethereum mining company. But after the 2018 cryptocurrency crash, it abandoned that business model and repurposed its GPUs for AI tasks. It only operated three data centers at the end of 2022, but that network expanded to 43 data centers with over 250,000 GPUs at the end of 2025.
By installing Nvidia's (NASDAQ: NVDA) top-tier data centers at scale across those data centers, CoreWeave can process certain AI tasks 35 times faster and 80% cheaper than larger and more diversified cloud infrastructure platforms.
CoreWeave generates most of its revenue from Microsoft, but its new contracts with OpenAI and Meta Platforms should gradually reduce its dependence on the tech giant. It had a massive backlog of $99.4 billion at the end of the first quarter of 2026, up from $66.8 billion at the end of 2025 and quadrupling from a year earlier.
From 2025 to 2028, analysts expect CoreWeave's revenue and adjusted EBITDA to grow at CAGRs of 97% and 101%, respectively, as the AI market expands. With an enterprise value of $104 billion, it still looks surprisingly cheap at 14 times this year's adjusted EBITDA. It's taking on a lot of debt to buy more GPUs and build more data centers, but its ambitious strategy should pay off over the long run as economies of scale kick in.
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Leo Sun has positions in Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Ethereum, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.