Hardware businesses are capital intensive. They need the money.

They also need to grow and iterate faster. Their software stack is great, but their hardware is quite dated in a fast moving industry. This limits them to domains that value their software and security but don’t need the latest hardware for performance and aren’t necessarily concerned with performance per dollar, which is a small market.

If they didn't buy all the RAM they needed for their near future before the prices spiked, they probably need most of the $200M just for that.

As companies grow, their capital needs actually increase, even if they are profitable.

We can hope that this is the case for Oxide, though I don’t expect they are reliably profitable yet.

They state:

> ...it's not uncommon for us to be asked directly: "How do I know you won’t be bought?"

Raising ~infinite runway from investors who are already known quantities signals that you can safely buy into their product knowing they're not getting snapped up by $megacorp anytime soon. That's where the faster growth comes from--customers who feel secure in the knowledge that the company isn't going anywhere.

Not necessarily. Supply chains and vendor management into scale is very difficult and very very expensive, I think we prob spend north of $200MM to get to $150MM ARR, but the economics started to shake out thereafter based on CAGR. To do this without owning 0% of the company while still recognizing needing a lot of cash in the system to keep everything lubricated, (for example Michael Dell might be fine personally extending a $500MM line of credit to the business, if the business has $50MM in venture funds on some predictable growth rate) - basically you use true risk capital via the smallest amount of equity you can give to de-risk downstream capital requirements. I don't know anything about how Oxide is growing their business so this could be total nonsense in their case, but it's how we built a generational business (digitalocean)!

Not sure this is necessarily for faster growth. Riding out the AI bubble's rise and/or its bursting will each present a lot of need for capital and a lot of barriers to raising it. They're not an AI company but they obviously have tons of exposure across the stack to these markets. They may simply be making the call that this is a better time to be raising money than the years to come.

There is a gold-rush going on. It needs plenty of compute besides GPU's, this is definitely the time to scale as quickly as possible.