Ornn raises $33M to help companies buy and sell AI compute as a commodity like oil

Artificial intelligence startup Ornn AI Inc. made a big splash today as it raised $33 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto-focused fund and others to build out a marketplace for computing power.

The round was co-led by Galaxy Ventures and saw participation from Nordstar and SV Angel, plus existing investors Crucible Capital, Vine Ventures, Link Ventures and Box Group.

Ornn was founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates Kush Bavaria and Wayne Nelms, who published a blog post on X explaining that they’re building the world’s first compute marketplace. The company first developed an index that tracks the cost of graphics processing units, which are one of the most vital resources for AI applications. The goal is to bring more transparency to a compute market that’s plagued by supply limitations and unpredictable prices.

“Right now, companies that need compute are shut out, overpaying or locked into opaque contracts they cannot benchmark or exit,” the founders said. The data center operators that sell compute resources are also disadvantaged by the lack of a proper marketplace. “Operators are forced to underwrite tenants one at a time, even as usage shifts across clusters, regions and hardware types,” Bavaria and Nelms explained.

In a blog post announcing the round, a16z crypto said that most compute contracts are currently negotiated individually between buyers and sellers, and that the prices vary by deal. As a result, it’s extremely difficult for data center operators to forecast future revenue accurately or manage risk when investing in more capacity.

The founders say it took almost a century for the oil market to reach a point where prices were consistent and supply was transparent. But compute markets cannot afford to wait for even a small fraction of that time. “The AI buildout is shaping up to be the largest reallocation of capital toward physical infrastructure in our lifetimes,” the founders wrote. “And it is being financed without the price layer, the hedging tools or the capital base that every prior infrastructure buildout required to scale.”

That’s why Ornn is determined to build a proper marketplace for the compute industry that has all of those elements in place. The goal is to help companies buy compute power in the same fashion as how commodities like oil are traded. Its transaction-based compute index OCPI is designed to provide a settlement-grade benchmark that provides a single, trusted price for compute resources.

“Risk transfer is facilitated through partners like ICE, which clears futures and options contracts that reference OCPI directly,” the founders added. “With a benchmark and the tools to hedge it, capital can finally flow to compute capacity the way it flows to every other commodity.”

Alongside OCPI, the startup has built Ornn Compute, which is the actual marketplace that aggregates GPU capacity from across public clouds and neoclouds into a single platform, with a simple onboarding process for buyers. It also features a secondary market for transfers and on-demand sublets.

“Operators receive diversified demand from a basket of tenants under one offtake contract rather than underwriting tenants one at a time,” Bavaria and Nelms explained. “Buyers get exact visibility into the site, hardware configuration, and terms of every cluster they reserve. With this platform, dedicated GPU capacity becomes a liquid asset, and capacity that would otherwise sit idle can be put to work.”

Last month, Ornn was boosted when the New York Stock Exchange operator Intercontinental Exchange Inc. said it will be using its pricing index for compute futures contracts, adding legitimacy to its services. The proposal remains subject to regulatory approval.

Ornn said it will use the money from today’s round to hire additional talent and expand its marketplace.

Image: Ornn